Three days passed.
During those three days gunshots could be heard at a distance and the electricity went on and off, as if a heated battle were being waged around a master switch at the local substation.
The men of Quail Street (a subdued Larry Hanna included) stood in a knot at the end of Bud Iverson’s driveway, trying to divine which way the storm was heading. For the most part it seemed confined to town, but occasionally a charged volley would erupt much nearer.
Rudy suggested they might better use the time reinforcing their homes, nailing up plywood and bracing their doors with 2x4’s, working in pairs to get it up quickly and efficiently. At the same time he broached the subject of a last safe fallback room with Larry, reminding him of his bomb shelter.
“Sounds reasonable,” Larry allowed, nodding his head. “I’ll have to clear it out; we’ve been using it for storage for years; Christmas stuff mostly, lights and decorations¼ I guess we won’t be needing any of that.” The thought seemed to deflate him, as if there was little else to live for.
“Not until December anyway,” Rudy said, offering a hopeful smile. “Do you need help cleaning it out?”
Larry glanced back at his house, regarding it with puffed cheeks and squinty eyes, as if calculating how many men it would take to lift the whole structure off its foundation and move it ten feet to the left.
“I think Jan and I can probably manage, but I’ll holler if we come across anything that might take an extra hand or two.” He turned back. “How soon will we need it?”
“I’d say the sooner we start moving in supplies, the better,” Mike ventured. A gunshot punctuated this sentiment and the men turned toward Kennedy Street. The war sounded like it was getting closer, perhaps as little as a quarter-mile away. It was hard to say once the echoes died away.
“All right,” Larry said, his voice gray and sluggish, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. “Why don’t I get right on that.” He turned and retreated toward his driveway.
“Well,” Keith said, hands on his hips, looking at the remainder of the group. “Where do we start?”
Bud and Rudy went to work on the east side of the street, beginning with the Iversons. Mike and Keith took up at the Sturlings.
“What about me?” Shane wanted to know, his eyebrow hoop gone and black eyeliner scrubbed away.
They put him on the Sturling’s rooftop with a rifle and a pair of binoculars.
Rudy held the sheet of plywood over the Iverson’s picture window while Bud hammered in the nails. They were long nails and took a long time to drive in, but once Bud got the top two corners secured, Rudy was able to let go of the sheet and pick up his own hammer.
“You know Larry a lot better than I do,” Bud said, pausing between windows to wipe his brow. “Do you think it’s a good idea to set up the safe room in his house?”
Rudy took a drink of water from his canteen. “He’s the one with the bomb shelter.” He shrugged and wiped his chin. “Can you think of somewhere better?”
Bud glanced next door at the Hanna’s. Larry and Jan might be inside clearing out the shelter, but all the curtains were drawn, so it was difficult to say what they might be doing. “It’s not the bomb shelter I’m questioning, it’s Larry. He doesn’t seem to be drifting on an even keel. I’m debating the wisdom of putting all our eggs in one basket and then giving them to him to hold.”
Rudy nodded. The same uncertainties had been nagging him for the past three days, yet he found himself wanting to defend Larry, or at least give him the benefit of the doubt. “I think he’s coming to terms with what’s happening; it’s just taking him a few more days to find his feet. I think the fact that he was out here today and willing to cooperate is a good sign.”
Bud reflected on this and nodded, donning his gloves again. “I’m just having a hard time reading him. One day he’s with us and the next he’s locked in his house, not answering the door or the phone. It gives me a bad feeling, right here.” He thumped his stomach. “I have this image of all of us pounding at his door while he’s inside his shelter, laughing at us.”
Rudy had visions as well, only in his Larry hadn’t been laughing, he’d been sobbing. All the rest amounted to the same though.
“Well, what do you suggest?”
Bud shook his head. “I’m not suggesting anything, mostly because I don’t know what we can do about it. I’d sure feel better if we had some sort of failsafe though, a guaranteed in.”
Rudy raised his eyebrows. “To a bomb shelter?”
“I know,” Bud sighed. “It doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
Mike was helping Keith with his windows and caught himself gazing at the house across the street, wondering what had become of the Navaros. The house was still dark, with the exception of the porch light, which burned both night and day. Mike found it odd that Don Navaro had sat through their initial meeting, nodding his head in agreement and making suggestions, smoking one cigarette after another, only to disappear later that night without a word to anyone, taking his wife and his three young sons with him.
Perhaps something had happened when he returned home, something to do with his in-laws as Rudy had suggested, or perhaps the impact of what they’d been discussing hadn’t hit him until then, when he was sitting down to dinner with his family, and he simply decided it would be easier to run. Hightail it west and hope to God he could stay ahead of it.
Or perhaps he saw something on television he couldn’t quite handle; there was a lot of that going around these days. After Chicago, the programs that aired had become increasingly disturbing, increasingly surreal. He himself had switched the set on yesterday afternoon to find what looked like local coverage of a PTA meeting airing on CNN. The meeting, he learned, was being broadcast from an Atlanta middle school, though instead of discussing school lunches and sex education, they’d chained up a black man infected with Wormwood and were hacking bits and pieces of him away with a cleaver and a saw until he stopped trying to attack and devour his captors. Mike had watched, fascinated and disgusted, until there was nothing left to torment but a bloody ribcage with a head on top, and even then the eyes and mouth twitched sluggishly, as if dreaming. It wasn’t until a fat man with a US flag on his sweatshirt put a gun to its forehead and pulled the trigger did the dreams stop, and that was just about all Mike wanted to know. In fact, he hadn’t turned on his set since.
“You’re slipping a little down there,” Keith said, murmuring around the nails in his mouth, the hammer poised over his right shoulder, ready to drive.
“Sorry,” Mike said, readjusting his end of the board. “Woolgathering.”
The next half minute or so was filled with the sound of the hammer doing its work, a racket that neither of them felt like talking around, but when it stopped Keith took the nails out of his mouth and asked Mike if he was having any bad dreams about the “incident” at 7-Eleven.
“Nothing that precise,” Mike answered, testing the grip of the nails on the siding. “The dreams I’ve been having the past few nights are more… generalized. Like finding myself in some strange, dark house and wondering where I am? Where the people are who live there?” He dusted his palms and looked at Keith. “How about you?”
“I keep finding myself back at those gas pumps with a gun pointed at my face, waiting for Rudy to call out those Stay Free maxi-pads.” Keith shook his head. “Sometimes he never does. Then last night it was you and him holding the guns on me.”
Mike regarded his young neighbor for a long moment. “You did the right thing, you know. They were going to kill us.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Keith nodded. “It’s just that it… it’s hard to get it out of my mind. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it; I just never had to shoot anyone before.” He looked down at the nails in his hand then looked back at Mike. “You know?”
Mike nodded.
“I guess it’s something I’ll have to work out on my own.”
“Sure,” Mike agreed. “If it’s any consolation, I think I’d be more worried if you weren’t having those dreams. It shows you’ve got a conscience.”
Keith flashed a brief smile, looking somewhat relieved.
“To tell you the truth though,” Mike went on, “I don’t think any of us have any right to be looking forward to our dreams. Not for some time to come yet.” His eyes wandered again to the house across the street. “Maybe Don had the right idea there… getting out while he could.”
Keith glanced over at the porch light. “Naomi had an idea about that,” he said.
Mike turned his head. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. She had this crazy notion that they never really left.”
Naomi Sturling emptied the shopping bag of all the first aid supplies and medications they’d gathered and spread them out on the Dawley’s dining room table, ready to draw up (as Pam suggested) an inventory of what they had.
“Be sure and check the expiration dates as you go,” Pam instructed. “Anything over four or five years old set aside for me to check. A lot of them are going to have lost their potency or just plain gone bad. It can happen a lot faster if people store their medications in the bathroom cabinet then fill the room up with steam every day from their shower. One year is the standard expiration date for prescription drugs, but if they’re properly stored they can last quite a bit longer. Pain pills and antibiotics we’re not going to have the luxury of being picky about, but there’s no point holding onto a five-year-old bottle of Viagra.”
“Nope,” Naomi agreed. “No point at all.”
The two women looked at one another across the cluttered expanse of the table then started to giggle. The giggles quickly turned to gales of helpless laughter.
Aimee Cheng walked out of the kitchen trailing the good smells of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, which she and Helen Iverson were fixing for twelve. “What’s funny?” she asked, a puzzled smile sketched on her face.
“Pam and I were just talking about dysfunctional bottles of Viagra,” Naomi answered, snorting laughter out her nose.
Aimee looked doubtfully at the loose jumble of medications on the table.
It only made them laugh all the harder.
Shane Dawley put down the binoculars and turned on the radio. There was a slight breeze over the rooftops that sang with a seashell whisper against his earphones, but the stations were still broadcasting, still pleading with people to stay inside their houses and not participate in the wholesale looting that was occurring in some of the downtown areas. Troops from Camp Walter, a nearby army base, had been alerted and would be patrolling the streets and anyone caught looting would be shot on sight. The cycling message went on to give a list of phone numbers that listeners could call to report incidents or get help with various problems, most of them of a medical or psychological nature, though the station warned of long waits to get through. Two or three hours in some cases.
“As of yet there are no confirmed cases of the Yellowseed virus in this county,” a calm, recorded voice assured its listeners. “I repeat, there are no confirmed cases at this time in Bayard County.”
Shane switched off the radio as the message began to repeat itself. It was much the same up and down the dial: calm assurances, yet with a sense that there was no one behind the taped announcements; at least no one but a squad of armed soldiers ordered to secure the station and keep the messages rolling. For the past two days there had been very little variation: stay inside, don’t loot, troops are coming, shot on sight, no Yellowseed confirmed, and call these helpful numbers. Shane was beginning to wonder if any of it was true or simply designed to keep the population docile and off the streets, their doors locked tight as they sat and listened to a prerecorded message or a busy signal on the phone.
A stealthy movement caught his eye, down and to the right, something moving in the grassy shadows underneath the Quail Creek bridge. Shane brought up the rifle and peered through the scope.
A man in camouflage was gazing back at him.
Mike and Keith were just finishing the front of the Sturling’s house when Shane shouted out on the rooftop above. With a sudden sour feeling in his gut, Mike trotted out to the middle of the yard (still holding his hammer), glanced left and right down Kennedy Street, then looked up at his son.
The boy was lying flat on the eastward slope of the roof, the rifle up to his eye and the business end pointed down toward the Sturling’s back yard.
“What is it, son?” Mike called up.
Shane cast a quick glance down at his father. “There’s a couple of men sneaking around underneath the bridge,” he answered, his voice almost a whisper, snatched away on the breeze.
Keith had joined Mike out on the lawn. “Are they armed?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Another glance down, as if to assure himself they were still there. “As soon as I saw the first one, he ducked back into the shadows. The other just poked his head out a second ago.”
Rudy and Bud came trotting across the street. “What’s happening?” Bud asked, his voice sharp and gruff, as one who’s accustomed to giving commands and having them followed. Despite the frailness of his age, something in his blue-gray eyes looked twenty years younger.
“The kid says there’s a couple of men under the creek bridge,” Keith answered, “acting like unfriendlies, but he’s not sure if they’re armed or not.”
Bud nodded and squinted up at Shane. “Listen up, son,” he called, cupping his hands around his mouth to make himself heard. “If they start advancing toward the houses, fire a warning shot into the creek bed. If it takes more than one shot, then aim to kill. Is that understood?”
Shane opened his mouth to say something, then apparently changed his mind and let it go with a nod.
“Now hold on a minute!” Mike objected. “Shane’s only sixteen years old! You can’t order him to shoot down two men just because they happen to be hiding under a bridge!”
Bud leveled his eyes at Mike. “I told him to fire a warning shot,” he clarified. “If they keep coming after that then they want something from us and they’re willing to chance a bullet to get it. We don’t have the ammunition to play games with them.”
Rudy nodded. “He’s right, Mike.”
“But he’s my son!” Mike cried, pleading with them even though a harder, stonier part of him knew they were right. It asserted itself in the same calm, emotionless voice that told Keith Sturling he had been right to shoot two men dead at the 7-Eleven.
“We’re wasting time debating this,” Keith argued, pulling his service pistol from its holster. “Let’s go find out what they want!”
Bud nodded. “Someone go and get Larry and tell the women to get the kids down in the basement.” His eyes wavered between Mike and Rudy, deciding which of them to send.
Mike made the choice for him. “As long as Shane’s up there,” he said, pointing, “I’m staying.”
“I’ll go,” Rudy agreed, and without another word took off toward the Dawley’s, running fast and hard with his arms tucked at his sides and his head down, as if he’d been dropped from a helicopter into battle.
Up on the roof, Shane fired a shot. It galvanized the group.
Mike and Keith had their pistols out, ready to move. Bud’s shotgun and hunting rifle were across the street, leaning behind his front door. He’d given his own service pistol to his wife.
“Spread out between houses,” he told the two younger men, using a hand signal he hadn’t used since leaving Viet Nam, where he’d led a platoon of men — kids, really — through the green side of Hell. “I’ll cross Kennedy and try to circle around behind them. Send Rudy my way if he comes back with Larry.”
Keith nodded and the three of them broke apart.
Shane fired three more rapid shots from the rooftop.
Somewhere behind the houses, a voice screamed angrily in pain.
The first skirmish for Quail Street had begun.
Shane glanced over his shoulder; saw Mr. Cheng running across his front lawn, and when he looked back through the rifle scope there were two men creeping out from the tangled shadows of the creek bed. They looked like deer hunters, both dressed in camouflage and both toting rifles.
Shane aimed five steps ahead of them and put a steel-jacketed round into the weeds on the opposite bank. The two men dropped out of sight, but didn’t retreat back to the concrete safety of the bridge.
“Go away,” Shane whispered, wishing them gone before he had to fire a second shot. “Get out of here.”
Below the eaves, Mr. Iverson was talking to his father and Mr. Sturling, using a voice that sounded like it was coming from an old World War II movie. Shane moved the scope slightly and looked back under the bridge. A third man in olive camouflage was aiming a rifle at him.
Without thinking, he fired off three quick shots, using the tight pattern that always worked so well for him in video games. The man fell back beneath the bridge, screaming in pain.
At the same time, the two deer hunters broke cover and ran toward the houses.
Bud heard the shots as he was hustling his 62-year-old ass across Quail Street and the jungle closed in on him again. Thirty-six years evaporated in a heartbeat and he was back in the forsaken country, half a world away.
He reached his front door and the illusion shattered. He found himself standing in the diffuse daylight of his tiled foyer, his car keys on a small table in front of him, his reflection gazing back from the flat depths of a mirror. Nightmare and reality overlapping.
Move, an inner voice urged and he broke eye contact with the illusion, reaching for his rifle. He checked to see that it was loaded, a bullet in the breach, and ready to fire. He thumbed off the safety on his way out the door.
Small arms fire erupted from the opposite side of the street, the combatants hidden somewhere behind the houses.
Bud swore and abandoned his plan to circle around the bridge, the time for surprise now flown. He checked up and down Quail Street and saw Rudy crossing from the Dawley’s to the Hanna’s, his brand-new shotgun in hand. In his haste he’d left the Dawley’s front door wide open.
Sloppy, Bud thought to himself, frowning. He made a straight line for it, the jungle stuttering back on him, coming and going in flashes, in green vines and palm fronds at the periphery of his vision.
A rifle sang out, hard and clear, and a patch of cedar shingles splintered off the shallow apex of the Sturling’s roof. Mike Dawley’s son ducked down out of sight, no more than three feet from the blast, frantically shaking cartridges out of a Winchester box.
Bud hurried across the Dawley’s front lawn, feeling old and stiff, an easy target for anyone who happened to break through their defenses.
What defenses? he asked himself, thinking they’d just gotten started with their hammers and nails, and a fat lot of good that plywood was doing them now.
He’d forgotten how quickly war could erupt from a clear blue sky, dealing out death with bloody red fingers. How was that possible? Thirty-six years in the suburbs and he’d forgotten that simple fact like an address or telephone number he no longer had any use for.
The soles of his Sunday loafers flapped on concrete and he stumbled through the Dawley’s front door, huffing and puffing as if he’d run an uphill mile instead of a flat 50 yards. He slammed the door and twisted the deadbolt, taking little comfort in the reinforced oak. Two men with rifles and an urgent sense of purpose would make quick work of the lock, and from the sporadic sound of gunfire out back, running along the banks of the creek, they were a long way from safety.
A pot of tomato soup was still simmering on the stove, Bud noticed, crossing to the sliding glass pane looking out on the back patio. He stood to the side, his back against the wall, rifle at the ready, and surveyed the back yard before plunging into the fray.
The front line seemed to have fallen back toward the bridge, with Mike and Keith at a middle distance, their guns poised to take shots around a black walnut and a line of cedars in Keith’s back yard.
Bud slid the door quietly open and a man in green camouflage appeared, a gun at the ready, close enough to touch. Bud realized that he knew the man: that he worked at the garage where he had his snow tires put on and taken off every year. The gun cracked abruptly between them and suddenly Bud was back inside the Dawley’s dining room, sprawled across the table with a bullethole in his guts.
The man from the garage followed him inside, mud squeaking on his boots, mixing with Bud’s blood and leaving smeared prints on the caramel colored vinyl. He raised his pistol so the barrel was pointed at Bud’s chest.
“Sorry about this, old timer,” he said gruffly, “but you’re better off this way.”
He pulled the trigger and Bud winked out like a blown candle.
Rudy heard the shot that killed Bud, but his ears didn’t differentiate it from the rest of the gunshots leading him to the west side of the street.
Larry had taken a long time to answer his door, and it had taken longer still to convince him to get his gun and leave the safety of his house; so long, in fact, that Rudy was a hair’s-breadth from seizing him by the shirtfront and hauling him screaming into the cul-de-sac, rifle or no rifle. Larry didn’t want to leave his family, he didn’t want to leave his bomb shelter, though Rudy argued that if the invaders got a toe-hold in the neighborhood, it would only be a matter of time before they took it all, Larry’s house and family included.
Jan Hanna, who was crouched on the basement stairs with her two young sons, agreed with this assessment and Larry reluctantly picked up his rifle, following Rudy down the front steps just as Bud was taking his first bullet. They crossed Quail Street with their heads down, moving at a fast crouch toward the narrow wedge of lawn that separated Rudy’s house from the Dawley’s.
They crept cautiously down the slope to the creek, ducking behind a fat blue spruce.
Quail Creek was not a daunting waterway; for most of the year, it was a pleasant stream of run-off from Hudson Pond; a murky green reservoir that waxed and waned with the seasons of the year. At present, however, the creek was running in its banks as if it actually had somewhere to go. They peered around the spruce, discovering they had an excellent vantage of two men crouched beneath the Quail Creek bridge. A third man, dressed in sodden camouflage, lay face-down in the water a dozen or so steps away.
The men under the bridge didn’t seem to see them; they were shooting toward the houses and Mike and Keith were returning their fire, keeping them pinned down in the shadows.
Rudy laid a hand on Larry’s arm, motioning him down, out of sight.
“Can you hit one of them from here?” he asked, nodding at the target rifle. “The shotgun isn’t going to do much good at this distance.”
Larry looked downstream. Roughly 100 feet separated them, an easy distance for the heavy-barreled rifle, but Larry had never shot at a living target before. Lines of doubt tugged at his face.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, lifting the stock to his shoulder and squinting through the scope. This only made matters worse, for now he could clearly see the faces of the men he was supposed to kill. He could count their gold fillings and the rings around their eyes. He let the barrel dip and glanced at Rudy, his mouth trembling. “I’ve never shot anyone before.”
Rudy nodded in sympathy. “Neither have I, but I’ll do it if you don’t think you can.”
Larry gave him the rifle. “There’s a bullet in the chamber. It only holds one, so you’ll have to eject the shell and load another before you can fire again,” Larry reminded him, then reached into his pocket for a handful of brass. “I brought some spare ammunition.”
“Get ready to load it for me,” Rudy said, setting his shotgun aside and lifting the gun to his shoulder. “When I pull back the bolt, put in another round.”
“All right,” Larry said, nodding nervously. He picked a bullet out of his palm.
Rudy gazed down the barrel, saw one of the men raise a hunting rifle toward Keith’s rooftop, then saw a thin lick of flame a fraction of a second before the sound of the shot came rolling past. He sighted on the man’s chest, just below the left shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.
He lifted his head from the scope and pulled back the bolt, ejecting the spent casing. Larry was staring down the creek. “You hit him,” he said, amazed.
“Load the rifle,” Rudy told him flatly, glancing at the bullet floating between Larry’s thumb and forefinger.
“Whoops.” Larry plugged the round into the breach and Rudy slammed it home. “Sorry.”
By the time Rudy got his eye back to the scope, the second man had swung his rifle around and was sighting in on them. “Get down,” he warned Larry and his finger twitched on the trigger, discharging the bullet against the side of the bridge, digging out a chipped splinter of concrete.
Larry took that as a call to retreat and took off running, making a beeline back to his house and the safety of his bomb shelter, leaving the rifle with Rudy but taking the handful of ammunition with him.
Rudy swore and tossed the useless rifle aside, reaching for his shotgun and suppressing a wild urge to send a load of buckshot after his neighbor. He scurried up the slope of the Dawley’s side yard, ducking behind the thickest part of the spruce to get clear of the gunman’s line of sight.
An angry shot whizzed past and ricocheted up the hillside. It was answered by a shot from the Sturling’s roof. Rudy circled around the spruce and saw Mike and Keith break cover, firing a fresh volley into the murmuring shadows beneath the bridge.
Standing in the kitchen of the Dawley house, his rifle pointed out the sliding glass door, Tad Kemper was sighting in on a tall man behind a walnut tree when a furtive creak in the flooring behind him warned that he wasn’t alone.
He let the tall man go for the moment and turned toward the dining room, the rifle at his hip, ready to gutshoot anyone who stepped out of the murky brown shadows.
“Mike?”
A woman’s voice: muffled, coming from somewhere to the right and slightly down. Basement, he thought, smiling.
“Mike, what’s happening up there?”
No nearer now than she was at first, yet the slow creak continued on as she shifted her weight on the squeaky riser, trying to make up her mind whether to come upstairs or stay put.
Tad moved cautiously from the back door, treading as softly as his boots would carry him. The riser stopped creaking and he froze, listening to the low whisper of voices that took its place; coming from somewhere behind a closed door between the dining room and the back hall.
At least two of them, Tad thought, his smile spreading. It was a dark and cadaverous smile, all the warmth and humanity eaten away. The trip up the hill had been his idea. It had occurred to him the previous evening while gazing out the back window of his tiny house on Lyle Street, seeing the lights in the homes above him twinkling like stars — distant and detached from the rest of the world, as if what was happening down in the streets of town couldn’t touch them.
At that point Tad had already killed two people. His boss had been the first, for trying to stop him from walking out of the garage with an expensive tool set. And his wife had been the other.
So far, his conscience had little to say about either killing.
The truth be known, he’d been daydreaming about putting an end to Audrey ever since finding out about her affair with Jed Robinson last fall. Robinson lived down the block and taught art classes at the college. A born pussylicker if Tad had ever seen one. He had admitted to these murderous urges in the office of the marriage counselor he and Audrey had gone to for a few weeks, but somehow he couldn’t quite rid himself of them, nor the indelible, overriding image of his wife fucking another man: her back arched as she rocked and moaned with pleasure; a pleasure that he himself, apparently, had never been able to give her.
Now she lay in a dark corner of the garage, her fucking days over for good. He’d been washing her blood from his hands at the kitchen sink when the twinkling lights had caught his eye, almost beckoning.
And with Audrey gone, he was going to need a new place to stay.
It just seemed natural to shoot for the stars, so he called up some of his poker and hunting buddies: Stan Lizotte, Bret Chastain, Greg Mashburn, Jimmy Nye. Only Nye had backed out on him, but then old Jimmy had always had a yellow streak in him, so that was no big loss. Probably would have shot himself in the foot by now anyway.
It occurred to Tad, standing there in the Dawley’s kitchen (and didn’t it seem that his best ideas came to him either in the bathroom or the kitchen?), that if you were without a wife or a steady girl and you were going to rob a man of his house and possessions, you might as well rob him off his woman too, because a man could get to feeling mighty lonely up here amongst the stars, waiting for some ripe piece of pussy to fall into his lap, so there was something to be said, perhaps, for a certain quality of mercy…
So long as one of the women had a face or a nice pair of jugs on her.
With that thought in mind, Tad Kemper moved a step closer to the door and the whispering voices.
“Is that it?” Keith wondered, glancing at Mike. “Did we get them all?”
There were two bodies sprawled under the bridge, another upstream behind Mike’s house, but neither of them was sure that that was the extent of the raiding party.
Mike looked up at Shane, his boy, who’d had a hand in putting down two of them. “We count three,” he called, still kneeling beside the creek, his pistol at the ready. “Is that all?”
Shane’s head rose slightly in silhouette against the sky. “Where are they?” he shouted back down.
Keith pointed. “Two here,” he said, then moved his arm, “and one up behind your place.”
Shane hesitated. “There were two of them running toward the house.”
Mike frowned. “Are you sure.”
“Positive.”
Mike rose up on the balls of his feet, ready to drop again if someone took a potshot at him. He could see the back of his house, but it was dark and mute, holding its breath, wives and children somewhere inside its belly. He glanced fretfully at Keith. “You don’t think one of them got inside, do you?”
Keith was frowning; clearly the same concern had crossed his mind. “It’s awful quiet,” he conceded.
Mike raised an eyebrow. “Is that good or bad?”
“Well good, I suppose.” Keith shook his head. “But I think we better check it out right away.”
Mike nodded and glanced about, looking for Bud or Rudy. “Where the hell is everyone?”
“We ought to check that out too. Could be that one or two of them got tagged.”
Mike surveyed the land between the creek and his back patio, looking at it in a way he’d never honestly considered before, as if it were a battlefield, laden with mines and foxholes. “How do you want to go about this?” he asked. “You’re trained in this sort of thing.”
“Straight from here to my house,” Keith said, his eyes checking the bushes, marking the windows, “then under the eaves to your place. We’ll cut between the two houses and go in through the front, that way if anyone’s watching they’ll lose sight of us. They won’t know where the hell we’re going.”
Mike nodded. “All right.”
“I’ll go first,” Keith said, checking his gun. “Stay spaced apart and keep your head down, especially crossing in front of the windows.”
“Okay.” Mike took a deep breath. “What about Shane?”
“Tell him to keep his eyes open. He can cover us.”
“I mean is he going to be safe up there?”
“As safe as any of us, I guess. He did some good shooting.”
Mike hesitated. “I don’t want to lose him.”
“I know you don’t.” Keith studied the rooftop and the wide stretch of lawn. “But right now it’s out of our hands. The sooner we get the area secured, the safer we’ll all be.”
“Let’s do it then,” Mike said, impatient for it to happen.
Keith nodded, positioning himself to run while Mike signaled their intention to move to his son.
Shane gave him a thumb’s-up, reshouldering the rifle.
“Wait until I get to the back of the house before you follow,” Keith said over his shoulder, then took off across the grass, bent over in a crouching stride.
A few seconds later Mike was pounding in his footsteps.
Pam Dawley was moving up the basement stairs when the door above her opened, revealing a fat, scruffy-looking man she’d never seen before. He had a rifle in his hands and, despite his angry shout to stay where she was, Pam backpedaled and ducked out of sight before he could take aim and stop her. The bullet he fired exploded within the close confines of the stairwell and smashed through a corner of the basement wall, blasting out splinters of ragged pine and a chalky cloud of atomized drywall.
The basement filled up with screams and the women turned like gazelles, stampeding to the far side of the room, Aimee Cheng herding and shoving her three children ahead of her.
The Dawley basement was not an especially large one. It had two small bedrooms, a bathroom with a shower stall, an unfinished space where the furnace and washer and dryer could chug and belch to their heart’s content, and a somewhat larger room that could be used for recreation or storage. What windows it had were small and set high on the walls, revealing only overgrown shrubs or pale glimpses of sky. The only exit was narrow and opened (with effort, since it was seldom used) into a concrete stairwell leading to the back yard. All of which did them little good since it stood, with the bath and bedrooms, on the opposite side of the interior stairs, leaving them nowhere except the dry darkness of the furnace room to retreat to.
Tad Kemper knew none of this, but he knew he had them on the run; that he was the wolf and they were the rabbits, their hearts thump-thumping as they scurried to the dead-end reaches of their warren. There was a fleeting moment of doubt as he turned the blind corner at the bottom of stairs, an unsettling image of one of them pointing a trembling shotgun in his direction, but as he swung his rifle around and crouched behind it, the room stood empty in front of him.
Confidence and certainty came flooding back. “Ladies?” he called, a toothy smile between his lips.
A hushed whisper met his ears: pleas for mercy… a prayer to a god who no longer mattered? His rabbits were hiding, shivering against one another in the dark.
“Come out, come out wherever you are!” he called, advancing slowly around a chipped coffee table, his bug-eyed reflection creeping across a gray television screen from left to right.
“Your men are all dead!” he laughed, pausing a moment to enjoy the joke. “Maybe you didn’t hear it, but I just shot the last one upstairs… an old duffer in a gray sweatshirt. Blew his fucking guts out all over the dining room table.”
A strangled sob broke from the darkened doorway, accompanied by more whispers.
“Go upstairs and look if you don’t believe me,” Tad invited, his rifle like a stiff cock in his hands, the thought of shooting it enough to get him off. “Go ahead,” he grinned, filling the doorway. “I can wait.”
A pale, lithe shape moved against the shadows. Far back against the brooding gray box of the furnace, a small child started to cry.
“Leave us alone,” a woman’s voice said, cracked and aged, hidden somewhere in the gloom.
“Sorry,” Tad said sadly, shaking his head, “but I have plans for you ladies. Each and every one of you.”
“Please,” another voice implored, younger and more supple to his ear. “At least let the children go.”
“Where will they go?” Tad wondered. “There’s no one left to take care of them.” He grinned.
Shifting shapes amongst the shadows. Fresh sobs as he stepped with his rifle through the doorway.
“I’m warning you,” the first voice choked, thick with emotion, ready to break into pieces.
Tad laughed softly and took another step.
Then something clicked in the dark and his smile melted clean away.
Even before the grinning, troll-shaped monster had come pounding down the stairs, Helen Iverson had known in an essential part of her that something outside had gone wrong. Horribly wrong. Being a practical, level-headed woman of Midwestern stock, she gave little to no credence to the notion of ESP or precognition or whatever nonsense they were calling it these days, but she knew that her partner of 37 years had been taken from her. It was as simple as a familiar hand dropping from her grasp, nothing more and nothing less.
The gray sweatshirt Bud had been wearing…
The thought of facing the world alone…
The troll in the doorway laughed and a piece of her turned silently to stone.
“Leave us alone,” she told it, taking Bud’s pistol from its holster without even realizing what she was doing. She touched the safety, felt it move beneath her finger. Since Rudy and the others had come back from the quick-mart, Bud had fitted her with a shoulder holster and insisted she take the gun with her whenever she left the house. Now it was in her hand and she thanked Bud for that, though in her heart she knew he was dead. She thanked him for teaching her how to shoot when they were younger. When the world was brighter, more vibrant.
The troll blurred in the doorway when Aimee asked it to let the children go.
A tremendous counterbalance tipped inside her, like an old tree coming begrudgingly out of the ground, its long roots torn and black with soil.
“I’m warning you…” Helen sobbed, though by that point she had already made up her mind. To let this creature run amuck, to allow it to take even one step further, would be an affront to everything she and Bud held dear or believed in; to order and decency, to civilization and the ideals of justice and humanity, not to mention God and morality. And if God was somehow responsible for letting this monster loose upon the world, He’d also put the gun in her hand to stop it.
The troll’s head swung her way. It laughed and took a step.
Rudy spotted Mike and Keith rounding the far side of the Dawley house and hurried to join them on the front doorstep.
“How many are left?” he wondered, his heart beating rapidly in his chest, his blood bright with adrenaline.
“Just one, we think,” Keith answered, crouched in the shadow of the eaves, eyes sweeping the far side of the street.
“You’re not certain?” Rudy looked ready to run back to his spruce.
Mike put a hand on the front door, as if feeling for fire; divining what lay on the other side. He glanced back at Rudy before grasping the knob. “There are three bodies down at the creek. Shane thought one might have made it to the back of the house.”
“And he’s inside?” Rudy rose from his crouch, the thought of his wife and children trapped inside with such a desperate man suddenly became intolerable, a torment.
“We thought it might be a good idea to check,” Keith said sourly. His eyes narrowed, glimpsing a hitch in the curtains at the Hanna’s across the cul-de-sac. “Where’s Bud and Larry?” he asked.
Rudy swallowed. “Larry panicked and ran back to his house.”
“Motherfuck,” Keith swore.
“I’m not sure where Bud is.”
“Well I’m going in,” Mike said flatly, turning the doorknob and inching forward, his eye to the widening crack between the door and the jamb. His face and jaw went through a series of contortions, like a man shaving with an uncertain razor. He glanced back at Rudy and Keith. “Entry looks clear.”
Keith nodded and the three men crept into the house.
Down a tunnel of silent hallway, they saw Bud’s body splayed beneath the dining room table. His blood was a still pond that reflected the muted sunlight.
“Oh shit,” Mike swore, his voice dry and despondent, a coarse whisper. “I thought he was going to circle around the bridge,” he protested, as if, allowing that, Bud couldn’t possibly be in his dining room, couldn’t possibly be dead.
“He must have seen something that changed his mind,” Keith said, letting it go at that.
A woman’s voice moaned beneath them, muffled to blunted emotion by the carpet and the floorboards, to each man sounding like his wife.
Then a man’s dark laughter rose behind it and they realized they’d come too late.
“Where are the stairs?” Rudy cried, rising to his full height as the first gunshot cracked below.
A blast like a sonic boom ripped through the room and Tad felt his face go numb. He reached up and found his hat gone, with something like yolk and broken eggshells running down the right side of his head.
A vengeful angel stepped out of the shadows, pointing a gun at him. His rifle was no longer in his hands. It lay at his feet, miles away. He looked at his hands and saw that they were painted red, with flecks of cottage cheese and hair stuck to his fingers.
The angel bared her teeth in a terrible grimace and shoved the gun into his surprised face.
He heard a distant explosion, like artillery falling, and that was all.
If there was any doubt the world had changed, it ended that afternoon on Quail Street, even before they climbed out of the basement and saw Bud Iverson’s body where it had fallen beneath the table.
The basement itself was a crimson stain, a house of horrors that each and every one of them had to walk through, the children included. Helen had done a very thorough job with her husband’s gun, a fact that she made no apologies for.
Upstairs, she took in the dining room as if it were a sight she’d already seen, somewhere deep within a dream. A short sound escaped her, like a seasoned fighter taking a sharp body blow, then her face hardened, as if reminded of the others around her. A single long tear rolled down her cheek, though she seemed unconscious of it.
Pam Dawley went to the linen closet and came back with a thick blanket, which she spread out on the kitchen floor for Bud. Naomi Sturling pulled back the dining table and her husband crouched down with Mike and Rudy to move Bud into the receiving arms of the blanket.
They carried him home and, after they left, Helen washed him and dressed him in his best gray suit.
Later, as she was sewing a fresh sheet around him for a shroud, the electricity went off in the cul-de-sac for good. The reading lamp in the corner winked out but she hardly noticed. Later still, as twilight fell, she lit candles around him to keep her vigil.
Shortly after eight o’clock, a knock sounded on her front door: light and apologetic, embarrassed by the intrusion. Helen rose from the bed, smoothed the wrinkles out of her dress, and went to let them in.
Rudy and Shane had dug a grave for Bud in the garden and, with the moon looking down over their shoulders, they buried him there.
All of Quail Street.
Tad Kemper and his three companions didn’t fare so well.
It had been Mike’s intention to bury them across the creek or below the bridge, somewhere out of sight and mind. He was mulling over the various possibilities when Keith came in from the back yard to help him carry Tad (yes, they’d gone through their wallets, putting a name — and in Tad’s case, a face — to each of the bodies) out to join the others. They were stacked beneath the shady arch of the bridge, waiting for a grave to be decided upon and a hole dug large enough to receive all four of them.
Mike had spent the better part of the morning in his basement, his wife’s rubber gloves stretched tightly over his hands as he stripped Tad of any useful items in his pockets, then rolled him up in a black plastic tarp. He worked gingerly at first, not wanting to touch anything, disgusted with the congealed splatters of blood and brain, but by the time he had the tarp rolled out, he’d become somewhat accustomed to Tad and even found the stomach to marvel at Helen’s handiwork. With two rounds she’d managed to rob him of any intellect or identity he might have possessed. Portions of his lower jaw were still intact, but everything above that was broken into pieces and open to interpretation. It was a lesson in ballistics and anatomy that Mike was unlikely to forget.
“What do you want to do with them?” Keith asked, his hands in his pockets, eyes regarding the black, bungee-wrapped parcel against the wall.
“I guess dig a hole anywhere that’s easy and out of sight,” Mike sighed, peeling off his yellow gloves and looking at his hands in distaste. They were pruned and clammy, fishbelly white. “Some spot where we won’t hit a lot of rocks or tree roots.”
Keith nodded as if he’d decided that much himself, but looked like he had something more to suggest.
Mike narrowed his eyes. “Did you have something else in mind?”
“Actually, I do,” Keith admitted, “but I don’t know how you’ll take it, much less the rest of the block.”
Mike smiled thinly, wondering if the day could hold any more shocks or surprises. “I guess we won’t know until you tell me.”
Keith hesitated. “It’s sort of barbaric; medieval, you might say… but it might keep this sort of thing from happening again.”
“Well I’m all for that,” Mike said. “Let’s hear it.”
Keith told him his idea and watched as Mike’s expression shifted; not as badly as he’d feared, but enough to know that he’d been right: it was barbaric. Yet at the same time it held a certain persuasion, a logic seldom seen outside times of war or anarchy; but then, hadn’t they fallen on such times?
The black bundle against the wall seemed to indicate that they had. That it wasn’t necessarily a new world they were facing, but a very old one.
Mike nodded, acknowledging the merits of the idea. “I can tell you right now the women aren’t going to like it. They’d just as soon forget these bastards.”
Both men, however, found their wives unexpectedly easy to sway. Barbaric or not, they had no desire to repeat the experience. They expressed some initial concerns for the younger children, but Rudy laid these aside, reminding them that his son and daughters had been trapped in the Dawley’s basement as well. The experience had already marked them, and this idea that Mike and Keith were proposing might give them a sense of justice, or closure, or simply a reason to hope it wouldn’t happen again.
“If these four men are the worst we have to face in the coming days, I’ll be extremely grateful,” Rudy concluded. “So if there are no other objections, I think we should go ahead.”
There were objections, of course; most of them from Larry and Jan, who had two young sons of their own; but since no one had seen Mark or Brian Hanna set foot out of the house in the last few days (and since Larry himself had been of little to no help during the recent crisis), these were overruled or outright ignored.
And since they were still living in a democracy, at least to the border of Kennedy Street, Keith’s proposal was carried.
Helen lent Rudy the keys to Bud’s old pickup and the men of Quail Street (including Shane but minus Larry, who had left the meeting in a huff) drove through the Sturling’s yard to the creek and brought back the four corpses.
The women (minus Jan, who’d followed in her husband’s footsteps) remained at the Cheng’s to make placards out of posterboard left over from Sarah’s 7th grade science project and an assortment of waterproof markers.
“TRESPASSER” proclaimed the first, rendered in large black letters and slung around the man’s neck.
“THIEF” shouted another, this one in dark blue and worn by the man Rudy had shot with Larry’s rifle.
“TRANSGRESSOR” accused a third in green. There had been some debate about this appellation, as it sounded archaic, almost biblical to the modern ear.
“Good,” Rudy nodded, pleased with the connection. “Perhaps they’ll think back on their Sunday School lessons.”
The worst of the placards was saved for Tad Kemper. “MURDERER” it screamed in dripping red blocks, and since he had little in the way of a head to hang it from, they pinned it to his chest.
Bret Chastain, the trespasser, was bound with clothesline and thrown over the side of the Kennedy Street bridge, where he dangled and spun in the hollow of the arch like a feast for a giant spider.
Greg Mashburn, the thief Shane had shot from his rooftop vantage, hung on a bright orange extension cord from the arm of the streetlamp at the intersection of Kennedy and Quail.
Stan Lizotte, the fabled transgressor, was spread by the arms, Christlike, between two power lines directly over Kennedy Street.
And Tad Kemper, murderer, was tied to the crotch of an apple tree in the Navarro’s side yard, his ruined face grinning up through the blossoms at the sky, arms thrown back as if he’d been cast out of Heaven.
They grew more terrible to behold with each passing day, but they worked. They were the last outsiders to venture up Quail Street.
Not that it mattered much in the end.
Six days later, with the coming of Wormwood, the street found a way of spawning its own nightmares.
It started at the Navaro’s, in the house everyone thought abandoned…