Keith Sturling could see the dead man from the narrow slat of his bathroom window and each day he wondered how long until decay and the man’s own weight would drop him back to earth. By night, with the power gone, the TV and the radio worthless, he imagined he could hear him creaking out there, turning slowly on the arm of the streetlamp, whispering a single word over and over in the dark. By day, the placard became legible again and there was no need to whisper, except perhaps to the plump black crows that perched on his shoulders and tore away any semblance of a face.
Then, on the morning of May 1st, there came an abrupt chorus of squawks and the crows all flew away at once, as if startled at something the man had said after so many days of stoic silence.
Keith slid open the tiny window, surprisingly attuned to such things now that the electricity was gone and the house was quiet, and saw the “Thief” kicking limply at the end of his bright orange cord.
Walking outside in his bathrobe and bare feet, Keith stared up at the struggling scarecrow, his heart beating very rapidly in his chest.
My God, he realized, it’s happening. It’s really happening.
Though the man’s eyes were long gone, his nose and ears chipped down to ragged holes, he seemed to sense that someone was there; close by, though just out of reach. This fact seemed to infuriate him. His struggles, which had been listless and tepid until now, became suddenly frantic.
A terrible moan issued from its throat, the strangulated sound chilling Keith to the marrow. Its tortured head jerked within the noose, seeking out that thing it wanted. That thing it so desperately desired.
The awful cry was taken up by another, every bit as insistent, and Keith turned to see the “Transgressor” swinging back and forth over Kennedy Street, trying to free its arms from the knots fastened at its wrists.
Shoot them, a voice suggested, assessing the situation from calmer quarters. Go back inside and get your rifle and shoot them dead.
“But they’re already dead,” he argued, his lips moving in a numb whisper.
Then kill them again, the voice retorted. Keep doing it until you get it right.
Keith started to move, his bare feet backpedaling reluctantly against the asphalt, his eyes still staring upwards.
Mashburn, he reminded himself. The man’s name had been Greg Mashburn, though until this morning he had been doing his best to forget that.
A high scream tore his attention away. He turned toward the house and saw his wife framed in the doorway, her mouth a perfect “O”. Mike Dawley was running down the street with a shotgun cradled in his arms while Helen Iverson stood on her front doorstep, one hand clutching her throat, as motionless as a statue.
“Sweet Jesus,” Mike swore as he arrived at Keith’s side, fumbling with the safety on the shotgun. He looked up at Mashburn’s ruined face and all the color drained from him, just like that, as if the shock of seeing the man thrashing about overhead was one nightmare too many. He lifted the barrel of the gun, swallowed something that went down with difficulty, and fired.
Mashburn jerked, the placard around his neck flew up in the air, then both dropped back against their tethers. Spatters of something that looked like rust (but smelled infinitely worse) began to rain down, followed by a gentler mist, and Keith suggested they take a cautious step back.
The sound of the shotgun brought the rest of Quail Street out to their doorsteps and driveways. Rudy Cheng was hurrying toward them with his rifle, his wife Aimee still in her robe, holding back their young son.
Mike reloaded the shotgun and pointed it up at the still-struggling Mashburn.
“Aim for its head!” Keith advised, taking several steps back, his ears already ringing.
The shotgun sang its one-note song and Mashburn clicked his heels at the end of his cord.
“Its head!” Keith shouted, to which Mike testily replied he had aimed at its head, but the thing’s legs and body kept getting in the way. “We need a rifle,” he said, plucking out the spent and smoking shell.
Rudy ground to a halt, huffing and puffing, holding his brand-new rifle. He looked up at the thief through the round rims of his glasses as if he’d long suspected such a thing could happen. It was not a confirmation that brought him any joy, but he accepted it for what it was: a truth.
Keith turned to him and pointed up. “Can you hit its head with that rifle?”
Rudy swallowed, his expression uncertain. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I haven’t had much practice.” He started to hand the rifle to Keith, but Keith shook his head.
“These are all tied up; chances are the next ones won’t be. They’re likely gonna be running down the street and pounding at your door. I can’t think of a better time to practice than right now.”
Rudy nodded, accepting this simple truth as well. He glanced back at his home, wishing Aimee would take his son back inside. This was not something he needed to witness: his father shooting at another man’s head. Still, this was what the world had become and there was nothing he could do about it.
“Find yourself a good angle,” Keith advised, “and get a bead on its head.”
The thing above them thrashed and snarled as if their intentions had been overheard.
“After you plug this one,” Keith went on, nodding toward Kennedy, “There are three more for you to practice on.”
As it turned out there were only two.
Helen Iverson had done a thorough enough job on Tad Kemper the first time that he was spared the dubious honor of coming back. Instead, he sat in the crotch of the Navaro’s apple tree and grinned at the sky as if God were playing a supreme joke on them all and he was the only one on the block in a position to really enjoy it.
One by one Rudy and the others shot the rest of them dead. Again.
Greg Mashburn took a bullet in the neck and two in the chest before Rudy finally found his mark. Each shot just seemed to make it angrier and angrier until the side of its skull blew out in a rusty plume and it stopped being angry for good.
Once this tactic appeared tried and true, the men attempted to get their wives to come out and practice their marksmanship on the other two, but all they got in return were looks of horror and disgust, as if it had been suggested they come out and have sex with some perfectly nice looking strangers.
“You’re going to have to get used to this,” Keith warned, shaking his head at Naomi, but she didn’t see it that way, at least not yet.
The same was true for Aimee and Pam, and Larry wasn’t even answering his door.
“So much for the bomb shelter,” Mike grumbled, gazing up at the Hanna’s living room window, watching the sly part in the curtains fall back into place.
“It’s still early,” Rudy asserted. “I wouldn’t count them out just yet.”
Mike sighed and turned away, shaking his head.
“Ask Bud Iverson how early he thinks it is.”
As the morning wore into afternoon, Rudy found himself thinking a good deal about Bud. He found himself wondering if they’d buried him deep enough.
Before the power failure effectively cut them off from the rest of the world, there had been several theories circulating on television and internet blogs concerning the origins and epidemiology of the phenomenon that had come to be known as Wormwood.
Initially, the thinking had been that it was spread like any other virus or contagion: by source to source contact, be it blood-borne or (more likely, due to the rapidity with which it spread) airborne. But there was a problem with this theory, Rudy realized, and the problem had to do with the three cases he and his neighbors had just shot dead. Not a one of which was breathing or exchanging potentially infectious materials at the time of the outbreak (unless, of course, the crows could be said to be carriers, which Rudy summarily dismissed because it didn’t fit the number of national cases).
A second theory he’d read of took a step into darker territory and held that the people killed or wounded by established cases took on the disease themselves, though they didn’t exhibit symptoms or become carriers themselves until after death. Yet again, at least on Quail Street, this theory didn’t hold true. Kemper and his buddies had been killed by bullets, not other carriers, and it had taken them almost a week to come back. From what Rudy had been seeing in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, areas of mass epidemic, the change took place in a matter of minutes, sometimes before emergency crews and family members could get the bodies out to the street to burn them.
A third theory, which had been gaining support when the electricity went dead, held that Wormwood wasn’t a germ or a virus at all, but a type of fallout or radiation spread throughout the atmosphere by the downed Yellowseed satellite. At first this was laughed off as science fiction or speculation, but the people doing the laughing were the same ones — grant researchers and government officials — who’d put the thing into orbit in the first place.
Proponents of the radiation model pointed to a map with an overlay of the satellite’s path of descent and a black “X” at the impact site, citing the first cases in a rural area of Pennsylvania and plotting the high density of subsequent cases cropping up along the westward arc of the burning satellite. It made a convincing argument, and it also explained why the phenomenon was traveling slowly but steadily westward despite natural barriers and rigid quarantine zones.
One man Rudy had seen on television likened the fallout to a long comet’s tail descending across the United States. While the epidemic appeared to be traveling in a westerly direction, what was actually happening was that the radioactive particles were taking longer to filter through the layers of atmosphere as they trailed back along the satellite’s line of descent. In keeping with that model, the longer the particles remained aloft the more dispersed they became due to factors such as wind currents and the Earth’s rotation. “That,” the man assured his audience, “is exactly what we’re seeing with Yellowseed.” He pointed to a map of North America overlaid with a menacing red fireball on a collision course with Willard, Pennsylvania, its long tail dissolving somewhere high over the waters of the Pacific Ocean. “The more time that passes, the more indistinct the tail of our satellite becomes, and the more widespread the contamination.
“Will that make a difference to those of you watching on the west coast?” The man shrugged. “Possibly. It all depends on how potent this thing is. To give you an example… if I were to open a jar of weapon’s-grade anthrax here in the studio, I’d kill two or three hundred people. If I were to release that same jar in an airburst above New York City, thousands if not millions would die.” He tapped the fading tail on his map. “Dilution or dispersion is no good if the potency remains high enough to kill; it simply means that more people will die. Yellowseed being a pet project of the Department of Defense, I don’t hold much optimism for a quick and easy fix, especially since no one’s stepping forward to tell us what it is or how to stop it. No one’s doing that because to do so would entail responsibility and blame; that means we as scientists have to spend precious time finding out what it is before we can begin the search for a solution, and at that rate this thing will have already run its course.”
The man folded his hands as if in resignation. “I’m aware that it’s not a particularly rosy or popular view at the moment, but I won’t lie to you. It’s a nightmare out there; most of you east of the Mississippi already know that.”
The program, as Rudy recalled, cut to a commercial immediately after this last statement. When it returned, the scientist with the sleepless eyes was gone, replaced with a smiling man who’d developed a brand-new Hollywood diet.
Rudy gazed down the street at Greg Mashburn, still hanging limply from his lamppost.
He wondered if it might be wise to dig up Bud and put a bullet in his head.
Just to be sure.
In the soft gray light of their bedrooms, the Navaros were slow to awaken, as if the tranquillizers that Don had fed them were still coursing through their bloodstreams, lying over them like stones. Of course their hearts were no longer beating so it followed that their blood (which had thickened and darkened in their veins, becoming visible through the skin) was no longer circulating. Their tissues, however, were still saturated with the drug, still lethargic and depressed, as if they’d been packed away in thick cotton wadding and left out in the summer sun.
So they were sluggish to open their eyes, to tumble themselves out of bed. Once up, they wandered from room to room as if searching, their footsteps dry and whispery against the carpet, like paper slippers.
Eventually they found something that triggered a response, an excitement they no longer found in one another. It came in pulses, in warm shades of red that moved back and forth across the front of the house.
In voices that called them brightly out of their sleep.
Keith decided the house was getting to be too much like a cave with the electricity gone and the windows boarded over. Rooms that were once light and familiar had grown brooding and indistinct over the past week, eerie with candles and long, flickering shadows, silent except for the sound of the wind trying to get in.
Time slowed down to an almost meaningless crawl. A clock that ticked but whose hands never moved, even when one wasn’t looking.
It was the perfect breeding ground for hopelessness and despair. A sense that life had ended and they were trapped inside a cosmic parlor or antechamber, waiting for Death to come and collect them. Or perhaps (worse still) they were simply forgotten.
The excitement of the morning had left Keith feeling restless and edgy, as if he ought to be doing something: standing guard on the roof or walking a beat up and down the street, rifle in hand. Anything but what he was doing, which was nothing.
Shane Dawley was up on his parent’s roof with a gun and a whistle, but so far Wormwood was keeping its distance, sight-seeing through the more densely-populated streets of town. There had been gunshots, distant screams and black smoke billowing here and there, but as of yet no one had come calling, infected or otherwise.
Morning had given way to afternoon and, after drawing lots for a watch, they’d gone back inside their homes to eat lunch and consider what ought to be done now that the nightmare had finally appeared. A meeting was planned for later that afternoon, over at the Cheng’s, but that was still hours away.
Looking pale and wan, Naomi had retreated to the bedroom with a book she’d borrowed from Pam or Helen, leaving Keith to pace about the dim confines of the house, to wander the same dead-ends and cul-de-sacs, alone with his gray, indoor thoughts. He picked up a magazine (likely the last issue of Field & Stream he’d ever receive) and tried to lose himself in its well-thumbed pages.
An advertisement for a Winchester rifle caught his eye, with a six-point buck gazing calmly (almost majestically) into a pair of stylized crosshairs. Keith blinked and found himself beneath the Kennedy Street bridge, squinting through a similar scope at something that was neither calm nor majestic. Something that accepted the bullets he fired with the dull indignity of a rotten tree stump.
He let the magazine close of its own accord and tossed it back to the coffee table, the morning’s horrors playing themselves out in an endless loop, haunting him, conspiring in the shadows with the two men he’d killed down at the 7-Eleven.
When Rudy knocked quietly on his door, wondering if he could help him out with a certain job that needed doing, Keith could have spun him around on the doorstep and kissed him.
That is, until he found out what Rudy wanted him to do.
Had it been simple gruntwork, a chance to get outside and use his muscles to hammer nails or haul supplies from one place to another, that would have been fine; but to dig up poor Bud Iverson (who they’d just laid to rest, for God’s sake!) and practice target shooting on his head; no, that was just another ghost to track back inside the house; not at all what he had in mind.
Still, judging from recent events, he couldn’t deny that Rudy had a point. It was definitely a job that needed looking into, and better to take care of it in the cold light of day than wake up in the middle of the night and find Bud crashing through the window.
So they had Aimee ask Helen over on the pretext of putting together some food for the meeting that afternoon, stopped by the Dawley’s and told Shane what they were up to, then wrapped their shovels and Rudy’s rifle in a long piece of tarpaulin and carried them across the street to the Iverson’s garden.
“Let’s make this as quick as we can,” Rudy suggested, donning work gloves while Keith spread out the tarp to catch the soil.
“My thoughts exactly.”
They glanced about the back yard, saw that no one was watching, then attacked the ground in short, swift strokes.
Mike Dawley was making love to his wife for the first time in eight months when the whistle sounded, screaming in its high, shrill voice from above as Pam was climbing toward her second orgasm and as Mike sensed an embarrassing amount of semen drawing back, getting ready to burst from his swollen end of his cock. At the shriek of the whistle, however, they stopped dead, looked at one another in dawning panic, then scrambled madly out of bed, reaching for their clothes as the whistle continued its warbling cry and the rifle punched sharp holes in the stained fabric of the afternoon.
“Go downstairs!” Larry Hanna told his wife, taking his face away from the part in the curtains long enough to see that she was behind him. “Take the boys and get down to the shelter!”
“What’s happening?” Jan cried, her voice breaking into a terrified bleat the moment she saw the expression on her husband’s face. A stark, pale fear had gripped him, instantly contagious. Instead of calling her children, she took a step toward the window, wanting to see what was swooping down on them, its dark wings spread.
“Get Mark and Brian and get the hell downstairs!” Larry shouted, reaching out and giving her a rough shove, one that sent her backpedaling toward the sofa.
“What is it?” she screamed, tears running down her face. “Tell me what you see out there!”
He tensed and let the curtain drop, reaching for his rifle. Rudy had knocked on his door and returned it the day after they buried Bud. He’d asked Larry how preparations were going with the bomb shelter and Larry had shut the door in his face. He’d regretted it later, but now, after what he’d just seen out the second story window, he knew he’d done the right thing.
He looked at his wife then slid back the bolt to insert a bullet. “The Dawley kid is up on the roof shooting at something,” he told her, shoving the bolt back into place.
“Shooting at what?” she wanted to know, an ugly crack running down her face. The days of isolation were taking a toll on her.
“I don’t know,” he lied. “Something down the block. Something I couldn’t see.”
What he had seen was Shane Dawley blowing his goddamn whistle as he shot down one of the Navaro kids. It wasn’t Zack — the one Brian sometimes played with — but Zack’s younger brother, Chase. He had been crossing the road in a sleepy kind of shuffle when the rifle snapped and knocked the toddler down to the asphalt, a piece of his shoulder turning to vapor, a rust-colored spray against the white of his t-shirt.
As the whistle blew, the kid got slowly to his feet again, as if it were all just a bad dream. He grimaced, took a step toward the Sturling’s house, then fell down again, this time after the rifle knocked his head sharply back. After that, the kid stopped moving, but from his vantage Larry saw his mother come tottering out the front door in next to nothing; a silky veneer of white satin that looked a size too small for her. She was moving in that same sleepy step, in no particular hurry to get to her fallen son.
The next time Larry looked out the window, his wife was finally moving downstairs to the shelter and the street was in chaos.
When Naomi Sturling heard the alarm, she put down her book and went to the front door, peeking out just in time to see the little boy from across the street fall down in a hard splash of his own blood.
“Oh my God!” she screamed, her hand flying to her mouth in shock. At that point she stopped thinking altogether and merely reacted, throwing the door open and running down the lawn to where he lay limply in the street.
Dimly, she heard her husband calling her name, warning her back in the house, but by the time it sank in it was already too late. She knelt down beside the boy, realizing as she did so that he’d been shot at least twice, and that he looked a lot worse than two bullets could possibly account for. It was obvious that he was dead, but he’d already begun to decompose: his eyes were glazed; a shrunken pair of cataracts, and his skin was deeply bruised, corrupt in places, like a badly-handled piece of fruit. And as she was noticing these things, it escaped her attention that Shane Dawley’s rifle was still firing, that the boy’s mother was almost on top of her, that her husband and Rudy Cheng were sprinting toward her with a pair of dirty shovels and screaming for her to run.
A shadow fell across her and she looked up into Irene Navaro’s eyes. Her first impression was that of an eclipse, that something dead and gray had swallowed up the sun. That its light was shining through Irene’s eyes, but dimly, like a powerful flashlight shining through layers of skin, giving off a bloody glow.
Then both the sun and the moon toppled from the sky.
Irene grasped Naomi’s head in her hands and started to pull. There was nothing gentle or neighborly at all in her touch, but something like the hardened grip of a schoolyard bully who’s taking a soccer ball away and means to have it no matter what.
When Naomi refused to give it up, Irene made a wet, hissing sound behind her teeth and leaned down to take a bite out of Naomi’s scalp. Awakened from her stupor by the warm splash of blood in her mouth, Irene held on tenaciously, gnawing down through bone and brain. When Keith reached her she was dug into his wife’s head like an enormous tick, bright red blood running down her chin and spreading across the white satin of her nightgown.
He swung the shovel into the small of Irene’s back, the blade biting into the flesh there and releasing a grim putrescence. A slow trickle of rust. She seemed not to notice, so intent was she on the soft, sweet window in Naomi’s skull.
Keith roared and hit her again, this time swinging the shovel down over his shoulder, getting some real muscle into it and slamming the blade down flat atop Irene’s head. That seemed to get her attention. Naomi fell out of her grasp and slumped down beside the boy, her eyes wide with shock, as if she were turning end over end, falling down a dark and bottomless hole.
Rudy caught a passing glimpse of the damage Irene had done and knew that she was going to die, perhaps even before the current crisis was over. He thought bitterly of his rifle, leaning against the alder in the Iverson’s back yard, three or four steps from the hole they’d been digging. In the sudden commotion he’d forgotten it; or rather, it had seemed more imperative to get to Naomi than to backtrack, especially with the shovel in his hand. Keith, apparently, had thought the same.
Irene’s lips curled back like the petals of an exotic flower, something moist and tropical and grossly repellant. A fleshy corsage a sensible girl would never let anywhere near her breast. Rudy tilted his shovel over his shoulder like a slugger about to knock one out of the park. Keith slipped around him while Irene was distracted and crouched down beside his wife. A low moan rose from the pavement, one of dead realization and despondency, and Keith began to drag his wife up the lawn toward the dark hatch of his front door, leaving Rudy alone with his shovel and the late Mrs. Navaro.
She shuffled toward him, her arms outstretched, eyes black against the falling sunlight, Naomi’s blood dripping like saliva from her open mouth. Rudy heard a sudden volley of gunshots, voices screaming from other places, but he was afraid to take his eyes off Irene.
He swung his shovel and struck her hard across the temple, the blade ringing in the street like a poorly-made gong. It knocked her off-balance for a step, but seemed a lacking deterrent, more a nuisance than a threat. Grimacing, Rudy adjusted his grip on the handle and turned his club into a spear, a weapon he could jab and stick at her rather than swing.
Her breasts sagged against her bloodied nightgown as she approached, the nipples flat and dead, no longer capable of becoming chilled or excited. Rudy took a step back and to the side. He threw the shovel forward and jerked it back, a deep, crescent-shaped wound gaping in her face, slicing across the bridge of her nose and down her right cheek, spilling out a gore that looked like rancid chutney. Something made out of rotten pie cherries. The smell alone was enough to repel him.
Rudy backpedalled and almost collided with Don, Irene’s chain-smoking husband. Don had apparently wandered out the front door of his house while Rudy’s back had been turned, and this was what the shouting voices had been trying to warn him about. It looked like Shane had been running interference for him as well, because Don had already picked up two or three bullet wounds in his short walk down the driveway: one in the chest that should have brought down a deer, one in the neck that caused his head to loll oddly, and an angry channel that had grazed his cheek and carried away most of his left ear. None of them appeared to be fatal, whatever that meant anymore.
For a dangerous moment Rudy froze between the two of them, husband and wife, unsure what to do, which way to turn. His shovel was drawn back, ready to strike again, and since it was more or less aimed at Irene he threw it forward with a savage grunt, catching her full in the face again. When he pulled it free, her jaw hung limp and broken, like a door whose pins have been pulled out of its hinges. It dangled toward her breastbone, stretched in an impossible yawn.
Good, Rudy thought, congratulating himself. At least she couldn’t bite him now.
He pivoted to try the same trick on Don and saw a third figure approaching, this one in bare feet and an unbuttoned shirt flagging out behind him. To Rudy’s relief he saw it was Mike and he was running from the far end of the block with a shotgun in hand.
“Get back! Get away from them!” Mike shouted, his feet slapping the pavement as he brought the gun forward, coming to a stop and seating it against his shoulder. Rudy threw his shovel at Don, chipping a shallow divot in his ribcage, and then ran, dodging Irene’s outstretched arms and nearly tripping over her dead son on his way toward the west side of the street.
The shotgun boomed behind him and Don’s head became a mass of raw hamburger, a walking meatball. He stumbled, fell, and then slowly started to get up again. Mike stepped up close to Irene, his face a pale grimace, screaming as he blew her head from her shoulders with one infallible pull. It lifted away from her body, bounced lopsidedly, and then came to a full stop before her legs gave up and her body crumpled.
Don had regained his feet and was turning around in slow circles like a broken toy, feeling the hazy air with both hands as if attempting (without benefit of eyes or ears or nose) to reacquire his former neighbors.
Mike started to raise the shotgun to finish him off but the rifle rang out and Shane beat him to it. Don’s bleary red head snapped back with the force of the bullet and he dropped to the pavement without further protest.
Mike turned toward his son, lifted a trembling okay sign on the end of his arm, and let the shotgun’s barrel droop toward the bloodstained asphalt.
A profound silence fell over Quail Street.
Three bodies lay in the street and a garish trail of blood bumped over the curb in front of the Sturling’s and disappeared inside the house, leaving a dark smear upon the grass.
Rudy picked up his shovel and Mike took up the one Keith had dropped and together they went from corpse to corpse, probing them first to see if they got a reaction, then using the tools to decapitate the two whose heads were still attached, just to be sure.
To his dying day, Rudy knew he’d never forget the feeling of stepping on the blade and working it down through two-year-old Chase’s pale and slender neck. As the last stubborn cord was severed, the boy’s eyelids seemed to slacken and something as grateful as a sigh eased from his open mouth.
It left Rudy cold, shivering.
He looked at Mike and Mike looked back at him. Neither of them had to say a word.
They both knew how many sons the Navaros had.
And as far as the open door on the Sturling’s side of the street…
Well, that would have to be looked into as well.
While attention was focused on the opposite end of Quail Street, a separate (and for the most part, unknown) crisis was developing at the Hanna’s. Jan had left her husband standing at the living room window, but when she went down to collect Mark and Brian, their two sons, they were nowhere to be found. What’s more, the door to the backyard was standing wide open.
She called their names, the first bright stitches of panic working through her. The sight of an open door was enough to jolt her these days, and when she called a second time and still got no answer, she clutched her hands to her face and screamed for Larry.
He came pounding down the stairs, his rifle leading the way. After the things he’d just witnessed upstairs (and from the pitch of his wife’s voice), he almost expected the rec room to be painted with blood.
“What is it?” he shouted, eyes bulging, his head whipping from side to side, but there was nothing for them to catch on except the weeping figure of his wife.
He realized the door was open, that a bright oblong of sunlight was standing against the opposite wall, standing where no such oblong had a right to be. The thought of his two sons streaked across the room like a ghost and his wife’s panic exploded inside him like a fireball, scorching his nerve-endings and leaving him trembling.
“Where are they?” he screamed, his voice a raw wound, ragged and glistening, as if they were already lost.
“I can’t find them!” she screamed back, her face livid, two red marks where her hands had been. “They won’t answer!”
“Did you look in their rooms?” he shouted, resisting the urge to stride across the room and slap her. The very sight of her in such a condition made it hard for him to think.
No, she realized, she hadn’t. But even so, their bedrooms weren’t that far away; even with their doors shut they should have heard her, especially now that the television and computer were defunct. Yet she hadn’t checked and Larry seemed to recognize this fact in her eyes. He thrust his finger toward the hall and told her to look. To check the bathroom and the closets and underneath their beds while she was at it; anyplace two scared boys might conceivably squeeze themselves.
In the meantime, he was going out to check the back yard.
“Well?” Mike sighed, his eyes on Rudy. “Which first?”
“The Navaro’s,” Rudy decided, gazing at the open doorway, “but I need to get my rifle. I left it in Bud and Helen’s back yard.”
Mike raised an inquiring eyebrow, wondering what Rudy and Keith had been up to with shovels and rifles in the Iverson’s back yard.
Rudy briefly explained as the two of them cut through the narrow strip of lawn between the two houses, both keeping a cautious eye on the shrubs and windows along the way, mindful that there was still a young boy wandering about, not to mention his infant brother.
They rounded the corner leading to the Iverson’s garden and stopped dead. Something was thrashing about in the raw dirt, its head and arms tangled in a torn and soiled bedsheet, trying desperately to claw its way out of the hole Rudy and Keith had dug. Its dead hands clutched at the loose soil and pulled it fruitlessly back into the grave.
“Shit,” Mike swore, his thumb pulling back the twin hammers of the shotgun.
The thing heard them. It turned around and made a sound like gas escaping from a torn bladder.
It was Bud; his eyes black, his teeth choked with topsoil.
An awful scream swooped across the yard, shocking them both. Bud turned to track it like a shark sensing a panicked splash.
Helen Iverson was standing at the far end of the patio, as white as a ghost, her expression conveying the dawning horror of one who thinks she’s buried her husband alive.
A strangulated moan rose from Bud and, forgetting the pistol he’d given her to protect herself, she ran to him.
The basement door standing open behind him, Larry moved out across the lawn like an astronaut leaving the safety of his capsule to take his first walk across the hostile vacuum of outer space. His eyes tried to see everywhere at once, giving him a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if the Earth were turning behind his back, throwing up the undigested remains of its dead.
“Mark?” he called warily, as if afraid of being overheard. “Brian?”
He heard a rustling in the lazy mass of junipers along the back fence and froze, his gun coming around and leveling in that direction. His eldest son crawled out into the faded sunlight, his shirt torn and his eyes fifty years older. His hair was full of dead needles.
“Mark?” Larry whispered, uncertain, his rifle still pointed at the boy. He felt a twitch jump through his trigger finger as the boy broke cover and bolted past like a rabbit, swallowed up by the basement door. Larry just had time to register an angry crisscross of cuts and scratches on his son’s back and arms before the door swung shut with a loud bang.
“Mark?” Larry called, the barrel of the gun drooping as he was confronted with the mute face of his own house, the door shut and the windows boarded over.
“Mark, where’s your brother?” he shouted, the sound of his voice bouncing off the siding. He realized that he was floating alone in open space, the hatch of his capsule screwed shut. There was a single bullet in the breach of his rifle and nothing to replace it with on this side of the door.
He turned back to the junipers, reasoning if one son had been hiding there the other must be as well. He managed seven or eight paces from the house when another noise, less furtive, caught his ear. He turned toward it, looking north up the rising hillside, and saw something that made his breath stop. Brian was laid out on his back at the edge of the lawn, not moving, and another boy was down on his hands and knees, leaning over him.
Giving him CPR, Larry thought at first. CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
His heart lurched, sending him stumbling over a seamless boundary that separated his life from that of his five-year-old son. He sprinted across the yard and was almost upon them before he realized, before he really saw what was happening.
It wasn’t mouth-to-mouth the kid was performing, it wasn’t CPR…
He was tearing out the bottom of Brian’s jaw with his teeth, devouring the soft flesh of his unprotected neck as if it were a particularly savory piece of chicken.
“Shit,” he heard someone swear, worlds away, and then a haggard scream raked down his spine.
Four-year-old Zack Navaro, who in life had often played trucks or soldiers with Brian in the back yard, looked up from the bloody tatters of his friend’s throat, saw Larry standing over him, and made a curdling noise like an old tomcat protecting a plump gray sparrow.
Larry saw the light of Wormwood in Zack’s eyes: a faint glow like a raging fever inside an otherwise empty skull. It gazed back at him, utterly alien, and he swung the heavy barrel of his rifle around, bringing it to bear inches from the boy’s face. Blood and flecks of pulpy gore were smeared across Zack’s chin, painting his teeth and dripping in long streaks down his neck, and Larry realized that this had all been stolen from him. That because of this his son would die and there was no good or God to be found in it, no matter how long he stared.
His face twisted. Tears rolled from his eyes and a strangulated sob, as bitter as black vomit, rose from his throat.
He tensed his stomach and pulled the trigger, expecting a sharp report but hearing only a dull snap, like two stones kissing in a dry riverbed. He looked down at the rifle in disappointment; it felt inert in his hands, a shape poured out of cheap metal and made to hang in a den rather than fire live rounds.
Zack Navaro stared up at him. Half a second before he tumbled over, Larry thought one of his eyes had widened, and then he saw the hole shot through the back of his head, bloodless and clean.
He pulled back the bolt and ejected the spent shell, his hands suddenly trembling.
Mike Dawley watched Helen run toward her husband’s grave with the slow clarity of a dream, one he’d suffered through a good many times and now knew every movement by heart. It carried with it the inevitable feeling of déjà vu, of circumstances spiraling down to a textbook conclusion.
“Helen!” Rudy cried, his arms turned into shovels, which was a bit like something out of a dream itself. “Don’t!”
The words flashed through Mike’s mind a heartbeat before his neighbor spoke them aloud and he brought up the shotgun according to script, squeezing off a single, hastily-aimed shell before Helen fouled his line of sight. The scattering of pellets caught a piece of Bud, peppering his back and shoulders, but from that distance it might as well have been a clean miss. The only thing that was going to knock Bud back into his grave was a point-blank shot to the head.
Rudy dropped one of his shovels and ran toward the garden, shouting Bud’s name in hope of diverting his attention.
Slipping another cartridge into the shotgun, Mike followed helplessly at his heels. At this point he knew where both shells were going; the uncertainty was whether or not he’d have to break the breach open and load a third for Rudy.
Zack Navaro’s small and lifeless body had fallen over Brian’s chest and Larry had to drag him away by the ankles to see the full extent of the damage done to his son.
“Oh Jesus…” Larry swore, closing his eyes and wishing the knowledge away. “Oh, my Christ, no…”
Brian lay on his back at the edge of the lawn, his arms splayed out slightly from his sides, as if in supplication or gentle offering.
Take this, my body, and eat of it.
“No,” Larry winced, falling to his knees, the phrase hammering at him so persistently that he had to clench his fists to get it to fade to a tolerable whisper.
A shotgun fired somewhere in the near distance, sending an involuntary twitch along his spine.
Larry opened his eyes again and looked down at his son.
To his surprise, Brian was gazing back at him.
Helen reached her husband well ahead of them, hardly aware of the shot Mike fired from the edge of the patio or what it might have told her.
Bud took her eagerly, hauling her into the grave and tearing at her before she even realized she’d fallen. He bit into her breast as a lover might, searching for the shortest route to her heart.
She tasted her own blood and, as the shock set in, wondered if this might be for the best.
She had her husband back.
And he had her.
Two more shotgun blasts: the sounds chasing one another across the hills and folds.
In the silence that came afterward, Larry Hanna got to his feet, his eyes fixed on his son. Unlike Helen Iverson, Larry had no illusions or misconceptions about what he was seeing, no fatherly urge to gather Brian into his arms and cry out his thanks to God’s mercy.
He knew his son was in Hell.
He knew it was Wormwood (and not Brian) crawling slowly across the lawn because he’d seen the same feverish glow in Zack’s eyes. The same terrible vacancy, burning to be filled, as if Larry had something it thought it could swallow despite the ragged hole in its throat.
Larry raised the rifle, remembered he’d fired his only bullet, and quickly reversed his grip, bringing the butt forward to use if he had to.
Brian continued his awful crawl, his head lolling listlessly, like a sunflower on a dandelion stalk, but his eyes never wavered. He gazed at his father through bruised lids and bloody lashes. Larry took a cursory swing with the gun but the thing in his son’s body didn’t even flinch, it just kept right on coming. After two more fruitless feints, Larry found himself backed up against the side of the house. He banged on the basement door with the flat of his palm, shouting for Jan to open up.
Brian came closer. Very soon, Larry realized, he was going to have to make the terrible choice of braining his son or dying with him. It was all well and good to tell himself it wasn’t really Brian; that it was the damned disease using his body, but that was an awful hard pill to swallow, even with his throat in tatters and his eyes the way they were.
“Damn it, Jan!” he screamed, pounding with his fist now. “Open up this fucking door!”
With Brian a few feet away and closing, Larry heard a frantic struggle erupt on the other side of the reinforced panel: his wife screaming at Mark to open it, for God’s sake open the door and let his father in, while the two of them fought for the handle. Larry heard his eldest son shout that they were all dead, that Zack Navaro had eaten Dad and Brian and now he wanted to come inside and eat them as well.
And while this argument played itself out, time ran out on Larry’s side of the door. Brian’s dead fingers clutched at his father’s shoe like the probing feelers of an enormous insect, slipping off the worn leather and clutching again. Larry kicked them away, but Brian was persistent. The fingers returned and Larry brought the butt of the rifle down, snapping the small bones in his son’s hand until Brian could no longer use it, until it looked like a tarantula which has come across the losing side of a boot. Yet Brian bore this with silent determination: inching closer, ever closer, until Larry aimed higher and swung harder and broke his son’s collarbone with a sickening crunch.
At the same time, Jan won control of the doorknob and Larry suddenly found himself falling through darkness. He hit the thin pad of the basement carpet and galaxies erupted against the dim gray tiles overhead, threatening to swallow him whole. At the same instant, the rifle bounced out of his grasp, his wife pressed her hands to her face and screamed, and Larry felt the painful rake of the door against the meat of his calf as Mark sprang out of the shadows and forced it shut.
He sat up in darkness, the starlight fading, reaching for his gun, certain that Brian had crawled inside, but the rifle was yanked painfully out of his grasp. In the uncertain gloom, he imagined that Mark was pointing it at his head.
“No!” Jan shrieked, brushing past Larry as the rifle clattered to the floor again, though not before he heard a hard, dry click.
Sobbing, Mark collapsed into his mother’s outstretched arms.
And beneath the sound of their weeping, Larry heard the blind grope of broken fingers at the base of the door.
Mike nudged the two bodies back into the earth and tried not to linger on the sight: the desperate tangle of limbs, the shocking wounds, the heads that were no longer much like heads, but clay urns that had cracked under the pressure of a violent fermentation.
He was tempted to throw a blanket of dirt over them, if not bury them completely, but he knew they had more pressing matters to attend to. The dead; these dead, at least, could wait.
“Did you hear a gunshot?” Rudy asked, sniffing as if a whiff of spent powder had just drifted past. The problem was that the whole day reeked of gunpowder. It was tangled in their hair, caught in their clothes, and embedded in the moist tissue of their sinuses.
Mike shrugged. “I’ve been hearing shots echo off the hills all day.”
“This wasn’t an echo. It was closer.” He looked over Mike’s shoulder. “It almost sounded like it came from the Hanna’s.”
Mike made a face. “I doubt that. Larry’s been shut up inside his house since we buried Bud.” At the mention of his former neighbor, Mike felt the presence of the grave again, the raw scattering of soil beneath his feet. He wanted to get away from the Iverson’s garden because he didn’t like the way his eyes kept pulling toward it, lighting on Bud and Helen like nervous flies, waiting for one of them to stir.
But Rudy was reluctant to let the gunshot go. His gaze remained on a gray slice of the Hanna’s, which was all they could see from where they stood.
“Look,” Mike argued, feeling jittery and impatient, “we have more pressing concerns to deal with at the moment. Let’s finish what we started before we go knocking on doors, asking for more. All right?”
He broke open his shotgun, extracted the empty shells, then felt in his pockets for more. He came up with two, but that was all. He plugged them into the barrels and snapped the breach shut. “Besides,” he grumbled, “Larry’s been taking care of himself pretty good so far. I sure as hell didn’t see him running out in his bare feet to save your ass.”
Rudy opened his mouth to protest, to somehow defend Larry’s actions; in the end, however, he simply nodded. Mike was right: the Iversons had been a tragic diversion, but they still had unfinished business awaiting them. When that was done, he would go check on the Hannas; by himself, if necessary.
He realized he still had the shovel in hand. It seemed almost a part of him now: a long and rusty tooth that had hacked off heads and punched in faces. A shiver passed through him at the memory and he felt no regret exchanging it for the rifle; a more refined tool that would keep death more than an arm’s length away.
He checked the clip and the safety. It was just as he’d left it.
With a nod, they moved toward the thick green hedge that separated the Iverson’s from the Navaro’s.
Eventually, as their sobs subsided, the others heard it too: the dry scratch of Brian’s fingers against the basement door. To Larry, who’d been aware of it all along, it almost sounded like tree branches bobbing in the wind, mindless and eternal, as if they could go on tapping until there was nothing left but a small white skeleton reaching beneath the eaves.
“What is that?” Jan wondered, raising her head from Mark’s and tilting it toward the door.
Larry wondered how she could ask such a thing. Surely she had seen what had become of Brian when the door flew open? He remembered her screaming, but perhaps that had just been surprise at his tumble. At any rate, Mark had been pretty damn quick to slam it shut again, so maybe she hadn’t.
Still, she ought to be asking about Brian… wondering where he was.
In the dim light that shone down the stairs, he studied her face. There was an expression there (or perhaps a lack of one) he didn’t recognize, as if she were paging through a book written in a foreign language.
Maybe she had seen and was in a state of shock, or denial?
Larry?” she said, her face an open question mark, troubled by the way he was looking at her.
“Never mind,” he said, picking up his rifle and grunting to his feet. There was a small, egg-shaped knot on the back of his head, tender to the touch. It shot off pinwheels and sparklers in the gloom of the basement and made his head ache with its own dull pulse. Grimacing, he waited for these things to fade, then beckoned to his wife and son. “Come on,” he said. “Come wait in the shelter while I have a look around.”
They went without argument, like grateful sleepwalkers.
The bomb shelter was a small and unglamorous hollow of reinforced concrete directly off the L-shaped turn in the stairs. The interior had been painted a solid shade of aquamarine, as if studies at the time had proved beyond a doubt that this was the most tranquil, the most soothing shade in the spectrum. Currently, it looked like moving day, with small comforts and essentials piled in boxes and shoved against the walls. Larry’s eye happened to fall on a small stuffed animal, a dark brown bulldog that Brian had brought down, and suddenly the shelter seemed trite and meaningless, its purpose already a failure.
He reeled his gaze back in and closed the door, assuring them he’d be right back.
Rifle in hand, he climbed the remaining stairs.
Most of his spare ammunition was down with Jan and Mark, but he’d left a box high on the upstairs bookcase with a vague idea of sniping. Never in his worst nightmares, however, could he have imagined the purpose he now planned to put it to, but this was what the world had become. As careful and diligent as he’d been, this was what the world had become. He need look no further than his own back door for proof.
Leaning the heavy rifle against the sofa, he took down the box and filled his pockets with a dozen or so shells (keenly reminded of the feeling of being caught without them in the back yard). As he did so, he drifted back to the high picture window and parted the curtains and inch or two, gazing down on Quail Street.
Bodies were laying in bloody rags and pieces, looking like debris that had been dumped from a passing plane. At the far end of the street, they were far enough away to be unidentifiable and Larry had no urge to get his binoculars to bring them any closer, so he simply let his eyes pass on.
The street seemed at something of a lull; no doubt gathering up strength for its next outburst. A glimmer of movement caught his eye across the cul-de-sac and he spotted the Dawley kid leaning against the rough brick backrest of his chimney, looking as pale as a death’s-head beneath his dyed black hair. His mother was beside him — a sleek pistol dangling loosely over her knee — and the two of them were talking, casting occasional glances over their shoulders and along the street.
Larry wondered if they knew what had happened in his back yard, if they were laughing ironically over it, and decided it didn’t matter. The world itself was a laughing black bird that would crow over each of them in turn.
He let the curtain drop and carried the rifle to the kitchen.
The view from the window above the sink was shorter, narrower, but there were still bodies to be found. At the edge of the lawn, half-concealed by the shade of a dying elm, Chase Navaro lay where Larry had dropped him, a preening black raven on each slender shoulder. They squawked and fluttered as he opened the window and punched out the screen with the butt of his rifle, but in the absence of a visible threat, soon swooped back to the boy.
Larry set the gun aside for the moment and climbed awkwardly into the sink, a vantage he’d never enjoyed despite nine years in the house. There was little enough enjoyment to be taken from it now, but a spring breeze took pity on him and sent a cool, caressing hand over his brow, bringing with it the sweet fragrance of cherry blossom and wild honeysuckle.
He angled first the rifle then his right shoulder out the window, his head an uncomfortable fit just behind them.
The blackbirds shifted nervously on Chase’s shoulders. The junipers along the back fence bristled and shivered.
Below him lay his son, his small head (achingly familiar in its swirls and cowlicks) nodding against the ground, as if he hadn’t the strength to hold it up any longer; which, of course, he didn’t. The muscles which might have allowed him to do so were halfway down Chase Navaro’s throat, which in turn would be eaten by ravens.
Mother Nature was a wonderfully efficient and unsentimental old bitch, Larry decided, wincing as the edge of the windowpane dug sharply into his ribs. He let the barrel of the gun list toward the ground as he adjusted his seat on the sill, and then braced the butt of the rifle against his right shoulder. Gripping the barrel as best he could with his left hand, he squinted down the sights.
With a dark twinge of dismay, he realized that all the logistics were in place: God had conspired to make it physically possible — necessary, in fact — for him to shoot his own son. Until that moment, the greater part of him had been silently hoping that it wouldn’t work. That the window would be too narrow or that Brian would be at an angle that was beyond him or that the gun would simply cease to function or fall from his grasp and shudder to the ground. Of course, it was still possible that the rifle wouldn’t fire, but Larry had faith. God had been with him this far, he thought sourly, surely He wouldn’t abandon him now. Larry Hanna had had it much too easy all his life; it was time he started to know humility and suffering, starting with his son.
“Please,” Larry wept, tears in his eyes as he sighted down the barrel, trying to keep it steady, a thousand conflicting emotions batting and tugging at him, ruining his aim.
He pulled the trigger and Brian twitched, a small black stain appearing on his shirt, just below the right shoulder blade. The boy paused, his head no longer shaking, his hand drawing back from the door.
Larry felt a strong urge to duck back inside, as if he’d just dropped a water balloon instead of a bullet and didn’t want his son to know who was playing such a terrible joke on him.
But Brian went back to scratching as if the bullet were only a teasing tap on the shoulder, trying to draw his attention from what lay beyond the door.
Larry exhaled despondently, wiping the sting from his eyes as he retreated far enough to reload the rifle.
God, it seemed, was going to make him get it right.
God was going to make him keep on shooting until he ran out of bullets or until Brian was properly dead.
Larry ejected the spent casing: it bounced along the counter, came to a tentative halt, then rolled in a slow circle off the edge to the kitchen floor. He picked a fresh round from the box. There were, he estimated, at least fifty more tries lined up inside, not counting the dozen or so he had jingling in his pocket. Nor the four or five extra boxes down in the shelter.
Pushing the shell into the breach, he wondered if even God could be that persistent.
It turned out to be a moot point, because his next shot found its mark. He was able to hold the gun steady and the bullet entered Brian’s skull almost dead center, right where the soft spot had been when he was a baby. A time both impossibly distant and impossibly near.
He died with little protest or fanfare, which Larry thought was something of a blessing, considering how he’d died the first time. Considering that, being shot in the head by one’s father was almost like being rocked to sleep.
It was all a question of perspective.
Edging himself down from the sink, Larry decided he’d had enough perspective for one day. He felt a deep need for sleep, to retreat from the world and crawl down inside himself. Down so far he wouldn’t even dream.
There was a name, he knew, for such a place.
A name he’d feared all his life.
But that too, he was discovering, was a matter of perspective.
Mike looked gravely at Rudy, all the color gone from his face, replaced with a pale shade of blue imparted from the windowsheers. “I can’t do this,” he said, the look on his face helpless; the desperate pinch of a man about to be sick. “Seriously,” he added.
Rudy nodded, as if to say he understood, that there was no shame in knowing this and admitting it.
The two of them had searched the Navaro house from back to front, finding answers to questions they hadn’t yet asked (most tellingly in the empty bottle of sleeping pills and water glass left out near the bathroom sink), but so far they hadn’t found Zack. He might be in the crawlspace or the attic or, more likely, he may have simply slipped out unobserved. Whatever the case, they found themselves lingering in this blue and cheerless room, transfixed by the one small thread in need of snipping before pressing on.
The Navaros had an infant son; they’d both known that. A boy born to them last fall — late October, it seemed; a very short life…
“Why don’t you wait outside?” Rudy suggested, gazing down into the crib where it wriggled like a bloated salamander, bumping its bald head from corner to corner.
“Are you sure?” Mike asked, making a quick study of his face.
Rudy nodded, not sure of anything anymore. Since quitting the Iverson’s back yard, Helen’s face had been following him, haunting him, frozen at the terrible moment Bud had bit into her. Was there really any surprise in her expression? he wondered, or just the grim agony of acceptance, as if she’d been thinking of him just as Rudy had, her own shovel calling from its hook in the garage.
In the end, she’d seen the shotgun coming and had been grateful. After thirty-five years of marriage, taking care of Bud was all she knew.
Rudy guessed the Navaros would want the same, the baby included. He had to force himself to believe that, if only for the next minute or two.
Mike cast a last troubled look into the crib and offered Rudy his shotgun. Rudy shook his head, hefting his own rifle slightly. “This will be fine.”
Fine? Had he said fine? That seemed an extraordinarily bad choice of words. Nothing about this day had been fine. Neater was what he’d meant; the rifle would be neater, less like overkill, though he guessed Mike probably knew that. His neighbor clapped him firmly on the shoulder, either in gratitude or to wish him luck.
Rudy told him to keep an eye out for Zack and Mike murmured something to the affirmative, then his footsteps receded, winding down the hall and passing out the front door. In the murmuring silence that followed, Rudy found himself alone with the baby.
He looked into the crib with a shudder. The boy was staring up at him, its eyes slightly luminescent, like glowing coins. It smacked its mouth as if calling for its bottle, its front teeth barely through its gums.
Rudy set the rifle aside long enough to search through the closet for an extra blanket. Unfolding it, a circus theme appeared. He threw it over the wriggling lump in the crib and a blue ghost with smiling baby elephants took its place. The blanket began to move on its own, like a cheap magic trick, the smacking sound muffled beneath. Muffled, but not fooled. It knew that Rudy was still there.
He took a step back and raised the rifle. It seemed very long and ridiculous in his hands, completely out of proportion to the task and to the room, like a lumberman’s axe in the kitchen to chop celery. Nevertheless, he brought it to bear on the head of the blanket, closed his eyes, and quickly pulled the trigger.
The report was deafening within the walls of the nursery, so much so that it startled Rudy into opening his eyes, almost against his will.
The blanket had been thrown to the far side of the crib, a rusty stain slowly spreading through its folds, poisoning the elephants. The stain dripped down the wall behind the crib as well; its flow thicker there, more essential.
Rudy stood in the blue nursery listening to the raspy caw of a crow beyond the flat space of the windowpane. He stood with the rifle in his hands and stared at the blanket for a long time, waiting for the elephants to move, to march, to wave their rubbery trunks.
Nothing happened.
He exhaled loudly, not even aware he’d been holding his breath. That he’d been holding it ever since he pulled the trigger.
The baby was dead. It was with its family.
Rudy knew that he could never come back to this room, that he would have to carry it away with him.
Elephants and all.
Mike heard the gunshot as he was crossing the street to his own house. He paused a moment to look back, but the Navaro’s looked the same as it always had. Gazing at it from fifty feet away, he couldn’t have guessed at the horrors inside.
He supposed it was like that all over — rows of nice, ordinary houses filled up to the ceiling with nightmares, each its own quiet tragedy; each its own private hell.
He glanced briefly at the Sturling’s — the front door still standing open — and continued across the street, stepping onto his lawn and wading in far enough to ask his wife and son how they were doing.
“We’re fine,” Pam answered, though she too, like Rudy, thought “fine” was a long way from the truth. She had an awful feeling, almost a certainty, that Helen Iverson was dead. She’d seen her walking back to her own house from the Cheng’s after the excitement at the end of the street had died down, but hadn’t seen her since. Scared, she’d climbed up on the roof with her son, and though she’d heard a volley of gunshots as she made her way up the ladder, Shane claimed he hadn’t seen anything. She wanted to ask Mike about it, and the shot they’d just heard from the Navaro’s, but she thought those questions could wait until later, when they were face to face and not shouting down from the rooftop for everyone to hear.
Her husband seemed to recognize this in her expression, in the crisscross posture of her arms and legs.
“We’re missing one of the Navaro boys,” he told them, creased eyes squinting against the sun. “The four-year-old; Rudy says his name is Zack.” He paused a beat. “Have either of you seen him?”
“No,” Shane replied, looking like a dead spirit perched atop the roof, his rifle at a restful slant between his legs. “But there were some shots that sounded like they came from behind the Hanna’s.”
Mike looked across the cul-de-sac. So Rudy was right, he thought to himself, frowning. He looked back at Shane. “How many?”
“Two or three, I think.” He shrugged. “They weren’t very loud.”
Mike sighed, troubled by this. “Probably Larry shooting at something out his back window,” he decided, imagining something wandering down from the hilltop. Zack Navaro flickered briefly across his mind. “Keep an eye out that way,” he told them. Their heads lifted toward something behind him and he turned to see Rudy emerging from the Navaro’s, a bundled blanket swinging from his hand. The three of them watched as he approached the piles of carrion at the end of the street and dropped the bloodstained bundle into the arms of its mother. He stared at it for a moment, as if undecided whether or not to leave it, then he looked up and saw them watching.
His head tilted toward the Sturling’s and Mike nodded.
“We need to look in on Keith and Naomi,” Mike told Pam. “You two stay right where you are. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Michael, be careful,” Pam warned.
He smiled then started walking. He was almost to the street when Shane called out to him.
“Mrs. Sturling… she didn’t look very well.” He hesitated, looking even grimmer. “I don’t think she made it.”
Mike nodded. “I’ll be careful,” he promised.
He met up with Rudy at the curb and the two of them followed the blood trail into the house. There was a surprising amount to follow, especially once they left the lawn. Inside the Sturling’s living room, they found themselves standing on an oatmeal-colored carpet, its knap thick and luxurious, with flecks of blue and brown sprinkled in to help hide the dirt and give it texture. The loss of blood was nothing less than shocking against it, as if it had come off a roller, deep red and on clearance all day. The smell alone was overwhelming.
The two men glanced uneasily at one another, knowing the only thing they’d find at the end of such a trail would be a corpse, which of course might or might not still be there.
Without a word, they checked their guns before proceeding.
Beneath the blood the house smelled stale, like a cardboard box left out in the sun. It was dark, boarded up. A faint fan of light fell against the kitchen floor, but the blood didn’t go anywhere near it; instead it veered down the hall, toward a bedroom or the bath, through nothing but gloom.
“Keith?” Mike’s shotgun swung over the back of the sofa. “Naomi?”
They listened but nothing moved, no one answered, though the dark itself seemed to grin back at them.
Rudy found himself wishing he’d brought a pistol, something that was easier to wield within the close confines of a house. Pistols, however, were in short supply and he’d left one of the ones they’d taken at 7-Eleven with Aimee. Another thing they forgotten was a flashlight. Over at the Navaro’s they hadn’t needed one because there was only a thin gauze of curtain over the windows, not ¾-inch plywood. The Navaros had bowed out of the game before the reinforcements had gone up. Here though, at the Sturling’s, there was only a small peninsula of light with a sea of darkness pressing around them. Another step and they’d be wading in it; two more and they’d be drowning.
Fortunately, a solution presented itself. Since the power had gone out, most everyone had taken to keeping flashlights or candles within easy reach, and the Sturling’s were no exception. There was a small penlight just inside the door, on a table that had once collected bills and car keys and sunglasses. It lay there like an unspoken invitation.
Come on in.
Mike picked it up and juggled his shotgun to get it working. A thin yellow beam appeared, ending on the ceiling as a fluid ellipse. He pointed it down the hall. The blood scraped the wall then hooked into a darkened doorway.
“Keith?” Mike shouted. “Naomi?”
The grin widened.
“Hello?”
“I don’t like this,” Mike said unhappily, his voice directed at Rudy now, as if his neighbor could somehow absolve him. Wave his hand and pronounce him free from any further responsibility. “He should have answered.”
Rudy agreed. They stood fast on their lighted peninsula, escape just a step away.
“Any plans or suggestions?” Mike wondered.
Rudy admitted that nothing came to mind, except the most obvious: follow the blood.
Mike frowned. “I was afraid of that.” He studied the darkened hall and sighed. “I told Pam I’d be careful.”
“Oh yes,” Rudy agreed. “Most definitely.”
The two of them inched forward, guns out.
Trying not to step on the trail.
The first bedroom they came to was a spare, a desk firmly anchored in the far corner. It had likely started out as an office or den and then simply became a receptacle for everything the Sturlings couldn’t bring themselves to throw away. A treadmill buried under a fall of winter clothes, a bookcase loaded with old videotapes and computer programs. A sewing machine surrounded by shoeboxes and magazines.
A thin layer of dust lay over the hard surfaces, as if the room had already been abandoned or was in the process of becoming a museum display, a place tourists would visit but find too dull to photograph. The flashlight swept the corners and poked about underneath the desk, but quickly decided there was little else to see. The room was unoccupied.
The blood led as far as the next doorway, then became a sticky pool on the bathroom floor, which Mike entered hesitantly in his bare feet. Here they found Naomi, jammed limply in a corner by the tub with her eyes staring up at them, as if the last thing she’d seen had been standing just where they were. Her pretty blonde hair was in bloody tangles.
A step or two further and they saw the bullethole, then the dark splash of brain matter sticking to the wall behind her.
“Shit, she’s dead,” Mike whispered, his voice a sharp hiss as the flashlight veered away, looking for Keith now.
“Wait a minute,” Rudy said, pointing toward the sink. “What’s that?”
Mike turned and bounced the light off the mirror, illuminating a towel bar on the opposite wall whose neat arrangement stood in gross counterpoint to the blood and chaos that had chewed up the rest of the room. Mike gazed at its reflection with a mixture of longing and fascination, as if the overlay of washcloths on towels were already a lost art. A fossilized piece of the past deemed useless and hastily buried while they were busy shooting their neighbors.
“A little higher,” Rudy nudged and Mike raised the beam another foot, wondering what else would become quietly obsolete in the devastating wake of Wormwood.
He saw what Rudy was looking at and frowned. “What is that, a bullet hole?”
A second splash of blood on the mirror — like an isolated island, well away from Naomi, — and a sharp chip along the beveled edge, punctuated by a black period. It seemed to speak for itself. When Mike focused the flashlight on the stain, the room took on a pinkish tinge. He glanced down at Naomi, certain her eyes had shifted with the light, and looked back at the mirror.
Rudy’s reflection looked deeply worried.
“What are you thinking?” Mike asked, afraid he already knew the answer. The blood on the floor was beginning to creep him out. He was afraid to move for fear he’d step in it.
Rudy’s eyes met his in the mirror. “I’m thinking that it would be difficult for a man to miss his target in a room like this, especially a trained soldier.”
“You’re afraid he tried to kill himself,” Mike said numbly, his heart thumping sickly in his chest.
Rudy nodded. “I’m afraid he may have succeeded.”
“If he shot himself, where’s the body?”
Rudy hesitated. “He may not have been as successful as he would have liked.”
Mike uttered a bleak, harsh-sounding laugh and glanced down at Naomi, thinking now there was a success story. He had to bite his lip to keep from falling into the insanity of it. Pretty soon they’d be tallying up the dead in strikes and spares, just like in bowling.
He turned the flashlight at the door, no longer interested in the bathroom but what may have staggered out into the dark. “I think we ought to rethink this,” he said, the shotgun trembling behind the beam, ready to blast anything that appeared in the doorway. “Go back outside and pry some of these boards off the windows.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Rudy agreed, though neither of them moved. Since stepping into the bathroom, a fearful paralysis had settled over them, stiffening their joints and making it difficult to leave. The small room, awful as it was, was safe so long as they had their guns. There was only the one door to defend, whereas if they stepped back into the hall they’d be vulnerable again.
“Do you want me to lead the way?” Rudy volunteered.
Yes, Mike wanted to say. Yes I do. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Rudy had already taken over for him in a moment of weakness in the Navaro’s nursery; he couldn’t very well do that to him again; besides, he didn’t want to give up the penlight.
“No,” Mike replied, forcing himself forward. “I’ll do it.” He stepped carefully over a puddle of blood and paused at the threshold, pointing the beam first left and then right. The house looked as empty as when they’d entered.
Goddamnit Keith, where are you?
Leaving Naomi and the bathroom, they crept past the spare room with its museum stillness and its thin layer of dust. Mike led the way, hugging the clean right wall with his shotgun pointed ahead, hip to hip with Rudy who was covering the dark places behind them. They moved slowly, like a four-legged beast, well-armed and dangerous if surprised.
Which was just what happened — four paces into the living room Keith came gliding out of the woodwork, covered with blood and grim as Death. Mike shrieked, jerked the shotgun at the nightmarish apparition and the thing went off, sending a flickering tongue of flame across the room. Keith (if he’d ever really been there) dropped instantly from sight, like a paper bag swatted from a darkened stage.
In the ringing silence that followed, Mike was not only certain Keith had been there, but that a look of surprise had crossed his face.
Surprise being a human reaction…
Which, if so, might just make him a murderer.
Huddled within the concrete walls of the bomb shelter, the Hannas could no longer hear the gunshots echoing off the walls from house to house. Larry had come back down the stairs, set aside his rifle and the spare box of ammunition, and with a bitter look of finality on his face, wrestled the door shut, locking them in.
“Where’s Brian?” Jan asked, only now growing concerned, apparently under the impression that Larry had gone out to rescue him. That, like Mark, he’d been hiding in the juniper bushes when Quail Street began to fall apart. Her concern quickly blossomed into panic when she looked into her husband’s eyes.
“Larry? What did you do with Brian?”
He looked at her flatly and said, “Brian’s dead.”
“Zack ate Brian,” Mark said hollowly, then shuddered against her breast.
The panic receded and a look of confusion took its place. Jan opened her mouth as if to smile, to tell them that it wasn’t a very funny joke, then shut her mouth uncertainly, glancing between Larry and the dark steel panel of the door.
“What do you mean, he’s dead?”
Larry Hanna looked hard at his wife, as if only now realizing that he’d locked himself in with a tiger, one that was just now starting to sharpen her claws. “I mean we lost him,” he told her, trying to keep his voice low and under control. “He came down with Wormwood and I had to put him down.”
Now the smile came out, hideous in the harsh white glow of the battery-powered lantern.
“Larry. Don’t be ridiculous. Open the door and let me see my baby.”
“Jan,” he said softly. “Brian is…” Dead, he meant to tell her, but something in her eyes stopped him: a glimmer far back that warned he’d said enough, that she knew he was dead. Knew it as well as he did, but wouldn’t accept it. It wasn’t stubbornness, it wasn’t a mistake… she’d seen what was on the other side of the basement door and had spent the time he was upstairs erasing it. Sketching something else in Brian’s place. Otherwise, she would have been at the shelter door, opening it herself.
In that moment, Larry understood an unhappy truth: that he could clutch his family close to him, but he couldn’t save them. The fires of Hell and damnation were burning all around them, inside the reinforced shelter as well as Philadelphia or Chicago. He’d been a fool to believe otherwise.
He realized that he didn’t want to die this way.
He didn’t want to die like Brian either, but here, cowering in the ground, it was somehow worse, as if they were already dead. And when he tried to imagine the possible outcomes, all he could see was one subtracted from three then subtracted once again from two, leaving him locked away with a rifle that would turn suicide into an unpredictable gambit. Further on, he saw his skin turning sallow and gray as death finally overwhelmed him, sealing him inside this artificial tomb, no longer able to understand the complicated latchings of the door. Reduced to a ceaseless and pathetic scratching…
Which no one would ever hear, much less answer.
Larry shuddered. He gazed across the vault at his wife and son.
No, he finally decided, this was no way to die.
“Mike! Be careful!” Rudy cried, but in the time it took to shout the warning, it was already too late. Mike was kneeling down behind the low screen of the sofa, convinced he’d shot Keith dead. Rudy allowed that it might be true, but lowering one’s defenses within arm’s reach of an unconfirmed kill seemed a terrible lapse in judgment, almost as if he were giving up his own life in contrition.
Swearing under his breath, Rudy stepped around the cluttered plain of the coffee table and pointed his rifle at the prostrate form on the carpet, trying to get Mike out of his line of fire while keeping a bead on the pale smear of Keith’s head.
“Christ!” Mike moaned. “I killed him!” His shotgun clattered to the floor near his knee as he brought the penlight to bear on Keith’s face, his free hand reaching to feel for a pulse along his neck. Rudy shouted for him to back away, at the same time taking a step forward himself, bracing for the worst.
In the shifting pool of light, Keith looked like something that had been hauled off a smoking battlefield. There was a scattershot pattern of shotgun pellets across his right shoulder, his neck and upper chest, but he looked like he’d been in pretty bad shape before Mike even pulled the trigger; before they ever set foot in the house, in fact. A ragged flap of scalp hung like a loose pocket above his right temple, powderburned and accompanied by a devastating head wound. Also a deep gouge had been taken out of his chest, just above his heart, this one looking suspiciously like a bite mark.
Neither of these had come from Mike’s shotgun.
Keith had probably been wandering around the house in shock, his hair and clothes saturated with his own blood as well as that of his wife. At least he’d had the presence of mind to put a bullet into her.
By the sound of his breathing, by the shallow sobs that came between each exhalation, Rudy surmised Mike was having trouble finding a pulse. He could see for himself that Keith’s chest was no longer rising and falling.
“Mike,” he began, his finger curled tautly around the trigger, “I think perhaps you should—”
Back away from him, Rudy had meant to say, but Keith’s eyes were suddenly open, burning with the faint phosphorescence of Wormwood, and the words turned to dust on his tongue. Mike froze, a sharp gasp punctuating his surprise as Keith’s head darted up, quick as a cobra. Two of Mike Dawley’s fingers disappeared in a heartbeat, tumbling down the open gullet of his neighbor’s throat like mackerel down a shark. There was an impatient attempt at chewing, a vicious gnashing of incisors, then the fingers were gone.
Mike screamed, holding up his bloody hand as if it were on fire, capable of engulfing him.
A part of Rudy seemed to step back from his own body and gaze down from the vantage of a casual observer, a disinterested witness in a world that had slowed almost to a stop. He watched coolly as the more solid, practical part of him stepped forward, thrust the muzzle of the rifle against Keith’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. A nearly bloodless hole appeared, tunneling down through the decaying corridors of Keith’s brain.
Keith’s red and feverish eyes looked up and Rudy jerked the trigger again, unaware that he too was screaming.
There was a moment of uncertainty, a sputtering of half-severed connections, then Keith lay still, the Wormwood fading from his pupils.
“Jesus, Jesus…” Mike repeated, trembling as he clutched his bleeding hand to his chest.
Rudy glanced at him and the two split parts of him clicked jarringly back together. Time resumed its normal cadence and he fell to his knees, breathless.
In the halflight, Mike wept for his two lost fingers, still wriggling in Keith’s coiled guts.
Rudy wept for the hours and days stretched languidly ahead, for darkness without the hope or promise of a dawn.
As twilight gathered in the easterly corners of the sky, they touched matches and disposable lighters to the wadded balls of newspaper and the pyre began to burn. Slowly at first, as the flames worked inward, then eagerly as the lines joined hands and the dry braces of kindling took hold.
The flesh was the last thing to catch fire, and when it did a sickening smell rose in greasy billows over Quail Street, wafting through the treetops as the breeze carried it in a leisurely and northwesterly direction. Fat crackled and snapped like pine pitch, hair smoldered and jackstraw bones shifted beneath the weight of the seasoned cordwood. Skulls glowed and grimaced from deep inside the oven.
Brian Hanna, Keith and Naomi Sturling, Bud and Helen Iverson, and the Navaro family in their grim entirety.
The four scarecrows who came to rob them, cut down from their poles and burned with their appellations, their time of usefulness passed; gone with the coming of Wormwood; lost on the illiterate dead.
Fourteen bodies in all.
And eleven left to watch them burn.
Night fell over the land and the pyre continued to smolder as the wood and bodies gave way to tar and asphalt underneath.
Rudy looked beyond the flames to the three houses standing unoccupied at the far end of the street. As they’d searched through them earlier, they made certain to close the doors and windows once the valuables had been salvaged: the guns and ammunition, the food and bottled water, the candles and batteries.
Yet there was something unsettling about empty houses that had the power to stare back at you.
Houses that haunted you with their stale rooms and drying bloodstains, with the memory of things you’d seen and done inside.
So they’d drawn the curtains and locked the doors to better keep those terrible secrets inside.
Rudy shuffled his feet and looked behind him. The women had gone inside, having little stomach to watch the pyre burn to its bitter end, and Mike had retired as well, his hand inflamed, swollen so badly after his wife had stitched it shut that he’d had to swallow a few Codeine tablets from their medical stores just to keep from passing out from the pain.
Rudy looked at the Dawley house and wondered if he was sleeping.
He wondered if sleep were possible.
One day in town and Wormwood had already gobbled up half the street. Three out of six houses.
Would its appetite be as healthy tomorrow? Would it be content to wait that long?
He looked at Larry and Shane; aside from himself, the last two holdouts.
Larry had emerged from his house after the tragic death of his son, his anger and denial gone, turned to a sluggish brand of defeat. He had hardly spoken a word, hardly taken his eyes off the pyre all evening, as if he knew just where his son lay inside. Rudy felt sorry for him but wondered how much help he’d be once the next crisis came. He seemed to have given up the fight, and even by firelight his face looked haggard and gray, as if pieces of him were already dying.
Shane, on the other hand, seemed to be emerging from his shell. He too seemed to have aged, but in a positive way, from adolescence into adulthood, as if his life before Wormwood had only been a prologue. Over the last two weeks, his mettle had been tested and he’d come out the stronger for it; less uncertain of himself.
And what about me? Rudy wondered. How have I changed?
Ah, that was much more difficult to say. He was certain there had been changes, as marked as those which had reshaped the others, but he found his perspective wasn’t as clear. He felt like the same man he’d been a day, a month, even a year ago, but he sensed that this was untrue. You couldn’t fight for your life, for the lives of your family and neighbors, without changing. Not after killing a man, after witnessing people around you die vivid, horrible deaths… after pointing a rifle at a 6-month-old and telling yourself you were doing the right thing in pulling the trigger.
The stress fractures were no doubt there, but they were still too small to be seen.
He found himself shivering despite the heat.
What was the point even considering it? Whatever he and the others were tonight would be reshaped tomorrow. Then again the next day, and the next…
Ultimately, their destiny was one and the same as the ashes in the fire. It was only a question of putting it off a little longer — a day, an hour; perhaps only another fleeting moment.
Long enough to find some sense or reason to make it worth the living.
Or worth the letting go.
Pam Dawley knocked softly on the bedroom door and then quietly entered. She didn’t want to disturb her husband if he was sleeping, but needed to check the stitches she’d sewn into the ends of his fingers to make sure they weren’t bleeding or infected. As soon as she cracked the door, however, she knew that she had worries about the latter, because there was really no mistaking the smell. Even working in a hospital, she’d never gotten used to it; that dank and swampy smell, as close as a body could get to rotting without actually dying. It hung like a dark green mist about the room, unable to escape with the plywood over the window and the air conditioning gone.
She closed the door behind her, not wanting it to seep into other parts of the house, and pointed her flashlight at the foot of the bed. Mike seemed to react unfavorably to its touch, moaning aloud and struggling against the damp press of the sheet.
She turned the beam away and the shadows lengthened, they moved to the far corner behind the hamper and trembled as if they too wanted out. Mike sat up in bed with a violent start, his eyes wide, straining against the light, and Pam let out a short, fluttering scream, her free hand flying to smother it back inside her mouth.
“Who is that?” he gasped, squinting across the room, his bandaged hand reaching for the loaded pistol he’d insisted she leave on the nightstand. Now it looked like he would shoot her with it. The gun, however, slid away and tumbled to the floor as he tried to pick it up, unaccustomed to the alterations that had been done to his hand; half his middle finger and three-quarters of the ring finger next to it now gone.
“It’s me!” she cried, turning the flashlight on herself, momentarily blinded by the beam. “It’s Pam, your wife!”
“Christ,” he sighed, letting the gun lie where it had fallen and rolling back against the pillow, his hair soaked with sweat. He raised his hands to cover his face, flinched when the stained dressings touched his skin, and closed his eyes against the grim reminder. Shaking his head and wishing it away.
For a long moment, Pam wondered if he’d forgotten she was there, and then his eyes opened slowly on the darkened room.
“I came to check your stitches,” she said, approaching the bed with a guarded step, as if he might have more guns secreted away. “How are you feeling?”
“Like something chewed me up and spat me back out,” he groaned, gazing at the empty air where his two fingers used to be. “I’m sorry,” he said, lowering his arm to the mattress, taking a long, rattling breath. “What time is it?”
“A little after nine,” she replied, leaving the flashlight atop the nightstand and turning toward the dresser. Half a dozen fat, scented candles sat atop it; candles she used to light before they made love. She struck a match and lit one. The delicate fragrance of sandalwood struggled briefly against the iron stench of infection, then turned sour and wilted.
She carried the candle back to the bed and set it on the nightstand. “You’ve been sleeping almost four hours.”
“Sleeping,” he echoed, a bitter smile touching his flushed face. “I’ve been dreaming… if that’s the word for it.”
“Nightmares?” She touched his brow and took her hand quickly away, as if burned. “You’ve got a fever.”
“I don’t doubt it,” he said, then smiled again, his head sunk deeply into the pillow. “Don’t worry; I don’t think it’s contagious yet.”
She looked into his eyes and then looked away, opening the drawer in the nightstand and reaching for the thermometer she’d left there with the gauze and the medical tape. “You’ll need some antibiotics.”
His smile remained: a grim line carved against the pillow. “Hope we have some.”
She put the thermometer under his tongue and told him not to talk.
“Now,” she said, moving the candle closer, “let me see your hand.”
He gave her his good one, gripping her as if he might not let go.
“The other one,” she chided gently.
He watched her face as she unwrapped the bandages.
It told him everything he needed to know.
“What’s my temperature?” he asked as she shook it away, the old-fashioned glass and mercury tube going back into the drawer.
“102.4°,” she lied. It had been over 104°.
He gritted his teeth and swore at her as she daubed his stitches with disinfectant and carefully redressed them.
“Where’s Shane?” he asked when she’d finished.
“Out at the fire with Rudy and Larry,” she told him.
Mike let his head roll back and gazed at the ceiling. “He’s a good boy,” he sighed. “I was proud of him today.” He glanced at her. “You’ll tell him that, won’t you?”
“You can tell him yourself in the morning.”
He nodded, but weakly, as if far from convinced.
Pam rose from his side and looked down at him, the worry a calcified lump in her throat. “I’m going to get you some Erythromycin; and some Tylenol to knock that fever back.”
“Okay.”
She lingered by the bedside, as if she still had something to say. It was large, he saw, even through the fever; something that was going to hurt her coming out. Her mouth twisted slightly and there were suddenly tears in her eyes, a deep and regretful well of them.
She sat back down and took his hand; the good one this time. She closed her eyes and the bed started to tremble.
“What?” he whispered, all at once afraid.
“Oh Michael,” she sobbed, clutching his hand between her breasts, “I’m so sorry for the way I treated you! I never should have listened to that foolish woman! That bitch Sally Kellerman!” She opened her eyes. “But when she told me about that girl I thought, I thought I’d already lost you! I got so scared that something inside of me went a little crazy and I just wanted to hurt you! More than anything I wanted to take Shane away and make you feel as bad as I did!”
“Shhhh,” he told her, reaching up to touch her face, to brush away a long tear and a lock of hair that had fallen over her eye. “You don’t have to do this,” he said gently. “You know that nothing happened. Tabitha Kilbey had a lot of deep and serious problems in her life; that’s why she came to me. You also know that sometimes clients develop crushes and dependencies on their therapists. It happened before with Marjorie Kincade.”
She sniffed, a helpless laugh hiccoughing out of her. “Marjorie was forty-five years old and over two hundred pounds; she wasn’t anything like Tabitha Kilbey.”
“No, he agreed, “but it’s the same principle.”
She nodded. “It took me a long time to realize that, and I caused an awful lot of misery in the meantime. I drove you out of the house and denied Shane his father.”
He smiled. “I had faith you’d come around,” he said hoarsely.
“But all that time we lost…” she lamented. “Those are five months we’ll never get back again, and I want them back! I hate myself for throwing them away like I did, especially how things have turned out. I couldn’t bear to lose you now!”
“You’re not going to lose me; at least no more than a couple fingers worth.” He grinned and took her in his arms, holding his injured hand away from her, as if it might infect her through the dressing. “This is right where I’m supposed to be.”
Embracing him, she felt the full heat of his fever and remembered the pills.
And how few there actually were.
In the kitchen, she counted them out in the palm of her hand.
Damn. Only eight; not even half enough, and they were almost two years old.
I won’t lose him like this, she thought stubbornly. I won’t.
She set one of the capsules on the counter and tipped the rest back into the bottle.
Her eyes glanced down the prescription label. She got to the end and realized she’d known the doctor who’d written it. He used to make rounds at the hospital in addition to his private practice; until he’d developed colon cancer and passed away last fall.
It was a strange world, wasn’t it?
She put the bottle away in the cupboard and silently thanked Bud for ignoring the directions.
It bought her some time.
Not much, but maybe enough.
She brought him the antibiotics with a couple of Tylenol, made him swallow them down with a glass of water, then tried to get him to eat some applesauce, a few spoonfuls; enough for the drugs to stick to on the way down. That done, she went to the bathroom and ran cold water out of the faucet, soaking a small towel and a washcloth and laying them over his bare chest and brow. He complained a little about that, but left them alone.
She sat with him until he fell asleep, thinking of what she might do to save him.
And when she’d decided, she slipped out of the room to find her son.
Shane shook his head vehemently, not even waiting for her to finish. “You’re not going!” he exclaimed, eyes smoldering, his voice raised to drown out her protests. “I said forget it! If anyone goes it ought to be me! You need to stay here and take care of him!”
Pam appealed to Rudy, who was standing further back, half-eaten by shadow. “Talk to him!” she implored, her expression underscored by firelight. “Make him see the sense of it!”
“I would,” Rudy answered, “but I’m afraid I agree with him. If anyone goes to town, it ought to be Shane. I don’t condone it, but he’s better qualified than you, and your skills are better used here.”
“But he’s just a baby!” she cried, horrified.
“Mom,” Shane murmured, flashing her a warning look. “I’m sixteen years old! I’m not a baby!”
“If I may, Shane?” Rudy interjected, turning to the boy’s mother. “What you’re proposing, Pam, is something akin to combat. The army recruits boys Shane’s age for such purposes. Boys who are quick and strong. They do not, as a rule, recruit 35-year-old women, however admirable their courage or nursing skills.”
“Now just a minute,” Pam objected, two red spots flaring high on her cheeks.
“Oh come on, Mom” Shane said, cutting her off. “He’s right and you know it! I can drive there and back in fifteen minutes!”
Here, Rudy interrupted. “You may have been able to do that in the past, Shane, but it won’t be so easy now; not nearly so easy. The nearest pharmacy, as your mother pointed out, is the Walgreen’s on Hudson Street. That’s in a good-sized shopping center off a busy arterial. I doubt very much if you’ll be able to drive up and dash inside. The roads, once you get to the bottom of the hill, are likely to be filled with obstacles, completely impassable in places.”
“So I’ll take Dad’s mountain bike,” Shane countered. “I’ll go around them.”
Rudy considered this then shook his head. “A bicycle doesn’t offer any protection if you find yourself cornered,” he pointed out, referring indirectly to the infected dead. “A car wouldn’t offer much either, at least not against a dozen or more, but you’d be better off on foot than a bike; it’s not as fast, but it would give you more agility.”
“You’re not going!” Pam maintained, her stance and her jaw set against it.
“What about a motorcycle?” Shane proposed, ignoring her. “A dirt bike?”
Rudy nodded. “That would be ideal, but where would you find one?”
Shane grinned. “The Sturlings have one! I saw it in the back of their garage!”
“Have you ever driven a motorcycle?” Rudy asked, doubtful.
Shane’s smile faltered.
“No he hasn’t,” Pam cut in, seizing triumphantly on this fact. “He hasn’t even learned to drive a stick shift!”
“How hard can it be?” Shane argued. “I can practice right here in the street until I get the hang of it.”
Rudy shook his head. “The sound of the engine will carry. It might attract… others,” he said uncomfortably.
“I can drive a motorcycle,” a voice quietly volunteered.
The three of them turned to look at Larry.
“I’m serious,” Larry asserted, frowning at their expressions. “Back when I was Shane’s age. I couldn’t afford a car and needed something to get me to work and to school, so I bought a second-hand Honda. I didn’t join a bike club or wear a leather jacket, and I sold it as soon as I could afford a car, but I rode it for two or three years, in all kinds of weather.”
“Could you ride me double?” Shane asked, looking at Larry with a new respect.
Larry smiled weakly. “I think I could manage.”
Rudy and Pam, however, weren’t as quick to warm to the idea, much less agree. Larry was aware of the frank, probing looks he was getting and guessed he knew what they were thinking. He hadn’t after all, distinguished himself very well in the past few weeks. In fact, he’d behaved like a scared and selfish coward. He saw this in their eyes and decided to meet it head-on.
“I know I haven’t done much to earn anyone’s trust; you don’t need to remind me of that; but I’d like to do this, if you think it will help.” He glanced into the fire, at the remains of his son. “I don’t know what’s waiting out there, no more than any of you, but I can guess. I’ve had to deal with it in a way that none of you have and I pray to God… well, I just pray that you don’t have to.” He looked up at them, his eyes rimmed with naked tears and fire. “It doesn’t seem likely though, does it.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of belief. “After what I saw today, I think we’re all just buying time — minutes and hours; no more, really.”
Rudy stepped forward. “If you genuinely believe that, Larry, why do you want to do this? Why do you want to drive Shane into town on the assumption you’ll find a drugstore that still has a stock of antibiotics and — providing you do find them and return here safely — that they’ll do Mike or anyone else the slightest bit of good?”
Pam and Shane both objected to this dour supposition, but Rudy waved them aside, interested in Larry now and not the niceties of his question. For the moment, they had ceased to matter.
Larry shifted uncomfortably, reluctant to shine such a searching light on his motivations and emotions. After a moment’s consideration, however, he admitted that he found his bomb shelter a lonely and sterile place, little better than a prison cell. He admitted that what they thought of him, how they remembered him, mattered, and what he wanted — more than simple survival — was to rejoin their society. He also understood that to do that, he had to make some sort of atonement.
“That’s admirable, Larry, but reckless as well. I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but the fact that you want to come back is enough for me. We don’t need to see you risking your life to prove anything. It’s not an initiation.”
“I realize that,” Larry nodded, “but there’s also a matter of self-respect. If you each contribute your strengths and skills as the need arises, why shouldn’t I? I don’t want to be carried; I want to help. If I’m standing here listening to you say you need a motorcycle driver, why shouldn’t I volunteer, since I can.” He paused and looked back at them challengingly. “Unless you’re lying when you say I don’t need to prove anything?”
“That may have been a poor choice of words,” Rudy admitted. “To be frank, blunt perhaps, Shane’s life may well depend on you and I’ve seen you falter under fire. We would gladly welcome you back into the fold, but — again, to speak my mind — that doesn’t mean I’m ready to trust you with my life yet, or Shane’s.”
“I guess that’s plain enough,” Larry grimaced, “but at this point, is there a difference? The issue seems fairly black and white now. There’s us and there’s them. What could be simpler?”
“It’s always been us and them, Larry; it’s just a question of where you draw the line. A month ago we never would have taken up firearms to stop those men at the creek, much less hung them from lampposts and power lines once they were dead; but it came down to an issue of us against them. This morning Keith Sturling was one of us and before the day was half over he was one of them. It happened in a heartbeat. I’m certain Mike can attest to that; in fact, it cost him two fingers. One day I might have to draw such a line between your house and mine, or the Dawleys. It all depends on how things unfold. I expect we’ll all have to make the same decision… when and where we’ll draw those lines.”
“In other words, it’ll be every man for himself?”
Rudy nodded, though hesitantly, as if Larry had goaded him into revealing a card he wasn’t yet ready to play.
“Yes, I believe that in the end, that’s what it will come down to.”
They went to their separate homes soon after, the pyre burned down to smoldering embers and the stars gazing coldly overhead, untouched by their fleeting lives and tragedies.
Pam and Shane came to a tentative agreement. If the motorcycle in the Sturling’s garage was in good repair and Larry was still willing to take him, then she would let him go. It was the only hope of keeping her husband alive, though even so, there were no guarantees. She might lose them both, whether he went to town or not.
No guarantees.
She would let him go as mothers the world over sent their sons off to war.
With bitterness, and a prayer for his safe return.
Rudy slipped quietly inside his house and bolted the front door. The rest of the house was locked and tightly boarded, but he made his rounds anyway, knowing he would lie awake in bed, wondering, if he didn’t.
When he’d satisfied himself that all was in order, just as he’d left it, he climbed the stairs and looked in on his children, feeling a brief chill of apprehension touch him as he grasped each doorknob. The day had taught him how fragile, how tentative their lives had become. That an unlucky fall or a prick from a rusty nail might easily snowball into a matter of life or death.
And such long lives stretched ahead of them… lives filled with unending caution and fear.
A bleak notion flitted in and out of his head like a rabid bat.
If he was a real father, if he really cared about their futures, he would take the gun that Keith had left behind and make a quick and merciful end to them, himself and Aimee included, because Larry was right when he said they were just buying time. Days and hours.
So much better, he thought, his face pinched, for them to die in the comfort of their beds… before something came hobbling up the street with the dark curse of Wormwood.
Horrified, he closed the door on his two daughters and backed away from such thoughts, such dubious mercies.
He prayed to God instead to watch over them and keep them safe throughout the night, discovering it was better to think in short-term horizons, in hours instead of years. Tomorrow would have to take care of itself; he would concentrate on tonight. Everything else was out of his hands.
The house was securely barricaded; there was fresh water and food in their stomachs; his family was intact and sleeping… these things in themselves were enough reason to give thanks.
He would need sleep himself, and best to get it while the street was quiet, while darkness rolled overhead.
He opened his bedroom and smiled.
Aimee was waiting up for him.
Candles were burning on either side of the bed, and by the faint smell of sulfur he guessed that she’d just lit them. The glow they created was soft and warm, tranquil and welcoming; not at all like the hungry blaze of the pyre. Here in this room, with her, he found he could almost forget about the world outside.
“How long have you been waiting up?” he asked, pleased with the way the candlelight attached itself to her. The bedcovers were folded neatly across her lap, her back resting lightly against a pillow and the headboard. She was wearing a sleek, satin robe the color of ripe plums, the front of it open to the waist, exposing her small and shapely breasts.
“Not long,” she answered, shifting slightly so the shadows across her changed. “I was getting dressed when I heard you come in.”
“You don’t look very dressed,” he said approvingly, checking the shotgun behind the door and turning back to her. “You look beautiful.”
She smiled shyly, moving her legs. “Do you think so?”
He kicked off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt, his eyes drawn to the dark “V” between her thighs. “Yes,” he nodded, his voice a low purr. “I do.” His shirt dropped behind him and he unbuckled his belt, his penis arched and erect, already imagining himself inside her.
He crawled into bed and sent his imagination elsewhere. Its services no longer required.
In the afterglow, the candles extinguished and the room given back to the starlight, he asked her how the children were coping.
“They each have their own ways,” she answered, her voice soft and forlorn beside him. “After Helen left I tried to keep them downstairs so they would be safe from bullets and couldn’t see out the windows. I let Denise go up to her bedroom to get her colored pencils, though, and she looked very pale and upset when she came back down. She didn’t even have her pencils. I asked her what was the matter and she acted like she hadn’t even heard me. She seemed very concerned about you… asking when you were going to come inside and if you’d remembered to take your gun. Every shot that went off afterward made her jump like a cat. I’m sure she saw something when she went up to her bedroom, but she wouldn’t tell me.”
Rudy frowned at the ceiling, guessing it must have involved Zack or Brian or Larry. From her side window, standing on her bed, she could oversee portions of the Hanna’s back yard. Some noise must have caught her attention while she was searching for her pencils.
“Sarah clung to me all afternoon like a frightened shadow,” Aimee went on. “Every time I turned around I’d stumble over her. After the fourth or fifth time I lost my temper and she started to cry.” A deep sigh floated up in the dark. “John’s the one I’m worried about. These last few days he’s been sleeping through everything. I was grateful at first because my hands were full with the girls, but I don’t think it’s a healthy sleep.”
“How so?” Rudy asked.
“It’s too deep. More like nighttime sleep than a nap, and he’s been sucking his thumb.”
Rudy’s frown deepened. “He hasn’t done that in months.”
Aimee nodded. “Almost a year now; a year come July.”
Rudy was silent for a while, so long that Aimee finally asked what he was thinking.
“Nothing,” he lied. “It just occurred to me that these are very small worries in light of everything that happened today. I’m certain that Larry and Jan would gladly trade places with us. Or Helen, or Keith…”
“Shhh,” she hissed, her face cross as she put a finger to his lips. “Don’t say things like that. It invites bad luck.”
He laughed softly in the dark.
“I just burned the bodies of ten of our neighbors, burned them down to blackened skeletons.” He laughed again, more harshly this time. “Your bad luck is already here.”
She turned away from him. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said to the wall, her hands over her ears like a frightened child, wishing the monster away.
He wondered if she thought of him as a monster…
The thought sent up a bright flare of anger inside him. Everything he’d done today he’d done for her. For them. For the survival of his family. A maddening impulse came over him to pull her hands away and shout at her the horrors he’d seen that day, most especially the thing under the baby blanket in the Navaro’s nursery. Tell her how the larger pieces had slid down the wall after he’d pulled the trigger. If he had to live with it, why shouldn’t she?
The impulse left him. It flapped its evil wings and flew away.
Exhausted, he reached out and touched the trembling curve of her spine. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
She turned, sobbing, into his arms.
“How’s Dad doing?” Shane asked, surprised to find his mother still awake, curled up with a blanket on the couch. It occurred to him as the question left his mouth that the situation could not have improved. That she was afraid to sleep with him in case the fever or the infection took over and he died during the night.
It reminded him of the poisoned days before their separation, except then it had been his father who had been banished to the couch, the television flickering late into the night.
Pam sat up, squinting against the flashlight, and he turned it away, toward the same television, which was only gathering dust these days. “You should be sleeping,” she said, stifling a yawn.
“I’m too wound up,” Shane said, sitting down beside her. She touched his hair, combing it back from his face, and he asked her again about his father.
“He’s sleeping,” she answered, as if this were the best they might hope for. “I took his temperature a while ago and it’s come down a little. Not much, but enough for him to sleep.”
A drowsy quiet settled over them, like falling dust. Each lost in their own thoughts.
“I’ve been thinking about what Mr. Cheng said,” Shane confessed, his face troubled and upset.
“Mr. Cheng said quite a bit,” Pam agreed, smiling at him wanly. “He gave us all something to think about.”
“What he said about the antibiotics,” Shane frowned, “about them not working.” He looked at her. “You don’t think that’s true, do you?”
She opened her mouth to tell him no, of course not, but the words wouldn’t come. The truth, now that she’d had time to think about it, was that she didn’t know, and that’s what she told him. Not out of a selfish desire to keep him at home, but because he was her son and he deserved the truth, not a mother’s comforting lie, however well-meaning. “This disease,” she told him, “may be affecting all of us; not just the people who die, but everyone, right now; and since we don’t know anything about it, it’s hard to say how it will affect healing drugs like antibiotics. They may work fine… or they may not. We won’t know for sure until we try.”
He nodded, seeming to understand and to accept this.
The next worry on his mind was even harder to speak.
“What if Dad dies while I’m gone?” he said, hitting her own fears squarely on the head.
“He’s not going to die,” she told him, her expression changing, cracking and hardening like flowing lava.
Shane pressed his lips together. “He might,” he said softly.
She wanted to tell him to stop being ridiculous, that the loss of two fingers was by no means a life-threatening injury, but again she couldn’t. The words got caught in her throat. The days of modern medicine were over, rotting slowly on the shelves. In another year or two they would be back to the Dark Ages, back to bleedings and leeches. In some ways, with the power gone, they were already there.
“She looked at him and decided on doubtful. “It’s doubtful,” she told him, brushing away a tear. “What’s your point?”
Again he hesitated, as if what was in his mind was too terrible to say aloud, in spite of everything they’d been through. “Will you…” he started, then looked away and tried again, from another angle. “If he does die, will you be able to take care of him?”
This confused her at first, and then a slow, shuddering chill crept up her back.
“I don’t want you to worry about that,” she told him, feeling ill at ease, as if Michael’s corpse — Stop that! He’s not a corpse! — were sitting in the dark with them, listening. “I’ll do whatever I have to do,” she assured him.
“You’ll have to shoot him,” Shane went on, as if he hadn’t heard her, his voice black and brittle, as if the words were small pieces of bile or dead tissue clotting up inside him. “Shoot him in the head like we shot those men under the bridge. Then you’ll have to burn his body…”
“Shane,” she said, his face blurred in the stilted light beyond her tears. “Shane, stop it!”
“…get some wood from behind the garage or anything that’ll burn…”
“Stop it! Stop it!” she shrieked, balling her fists and battering his upper arm and shoulder as if he were an appliance that wouldn’t turn off. A washing machine that was scarring her new vinyl floor.
Surprised, he stopped. He looked at her as if awakening from a trance.
Then burst into tears.
Not far away, behind a door at the end of the hall, Mike Dawley surfaced briefly from sleep, the remains of a dream dissolving around him, moving off and rearranging itself beyond the borders of the bed. He felt something cold resting on his eyelids: two coins that slid off his cheeks to the mattress as he tried to sit up. He felt blindly along the sheet for them, but like the dream they too seemed to disappear.
A moment later he forgot what he was looking for and leaned back against his pillow.
Something was in the room with him, something that watched at the foot of the bed but did not stir.
He reached out with his good hand. “Pam?”
He knew at once that it wasn’t Pam.
The shape he saw in his mind’s eye was a corpse. It was Helen Iverson, grinning and pointing a gun at his head, waiting to return a favor. She had put the pennies on his eyes.
“Go away,” he told her, searching again for the lost coins, wanting to throw them at her. “I’m not going to die!”
She turned and faded into the surrounding darkness, a smile still touching her lips, as if they both knew better.
In the reinforced bunker beneath his basement stairs, Larry Hanna found his wife and son almost exactly as he’d left them. She was stroking Mark’s hair, which had grown wet with a rancid perspiration, rocking him back and forth while he slept, as if he were a doll she couldn’t bear to part with.
The scratches and welts on Mark’s back, still visible through the rips in his dampened shirt, looked much worse in the artificial light. They looked angry, infected; not so much like juniper scratches, but fingernail rakes.
He wondered if they had come from an effort to save his brother.
Either way, it wouldn’t do to let them fester. They ought to be cleaned with disinfectant, covered perhaps.
Larry sat down and told his wife his plans for the morning.
She continued her rocking and gazed through him as if he weren’t there.
“Jan?” he said softly, leaning closer, searching for the place where her eyes were focused but not finding it. “Did you hear what I said?”
There was no response, just the same compulsive rocking.
When he tried to take Mark away from her, she started to scream.