The second day of the plague dawned hazy and red, the air sharp with smoke from fires that had burned throughout the night. A gray veil hung over the city, a stagnant inversion that kept the sharpness from rising or blowing away.
Rudy closed the window and let the curtain fall, wondering how many bodies had gone up in smoke during the night? How many he was taking in with each breath?
He turned and looked at his wife, still sleeping.
His hair and clothes smelled of the pyre, a greasy, queasy smell that he was unlikely to forget. He wondered about taking a shower and decided he could use one. The street was quiet and he could be in and out in five minutes; as cold as the water was, five minutes would be about all he could take.
When he came out — still toweling, trying to rub the goosebumps away — Aimee was awake, sitting up in bed with her robe on. She told him the children were still sleeping, that she’d just been in their rooms to check on them. He nodded and dressed himself quickly in fresh, clean-smelling clothes.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, looking at him as if it were a perfectly normal Sunday morning. “Should I fix you some breakfast?”
Rudy considered it, tempted, and shook his head. He reminded her that Larry and Shane were going into town. He would need to help them get the motorcycle ready, make preparations… a bowl of cold cereal with powdered milk would be enough, and he could make that himself.
“In that case,” she yawned, “I think I’ll sleep a little longer.”
He kissed her and went downstairs, leaving the rising sunlight for the subterranean feel of the rooms below. He checked the doors and windows, satisfying himself that no one had tried to break in during the night, then sat down at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cheerios and some leftover pineapple, which he ate straight from the can. The water from the faucet looked murky, unsettled, and he dumped it down the drain without tasting it, thinking God knew what might have fallen into the reservoir.
He mixed the milk with bottled water and ate quickly, depressed by the dim surroundings. When he was finished, he put the dishes in the sink (not even wanting to rinse them with the dingy tap water) and, taking the pistol Aimee had left atop the entertainment center, went outside to see if Larry and Shane were awake yet.
There was a dog in the cul-de-sac, a black and white border collie that was trying to pull something out of the scorched heap of the pyre.
“Hey!” Rudy shouted, taking an unguarded step toward the street. “Get away from there! Heyah!” He made wild shooing motions with his free hand, his heels clipping down the walk. “Go on!”
The collie skittered back, startled, retreating down the street as far as the Dawley’s before looking back to see if Rudy was giving chase. When it saw that he wasn’t, the dog came to a stop, ears up and alert.
“Keep going!” Rudy told it, throwing out his arm once again, a gesture no longer so threatening from sixty feet away.
The dog stood and watched him. It glanced at the smoldering remains of the pyre, licked its muzzle, and then looked at Rudy once again. Rudy had no desire to shoot it, but neither did he care to watch it drag bone after bone out of the cooling ashes, making a meal out of people he once knew.
He held the pistol over his head and fired it into the air, setting off a bang that echoed in the morning silence of the surrounding hills. The collie bolted; not down the street, but into the gap between the Iverson’s and the Navaro’s, where Rudy lost sight of it.
A door opened to his right; Shane in jeans and a black t-shirt, a rifle in his hand. He looked at Rudy questioningly.
“It was a dog,” Rudy told him. “I caught it foraging in the fire.”
Shane nodded, the rifle relaxing as he started to turn back inside.
“How’s Mike?” Rudy inquired.
Shane shrugged. “About the same.”
“Are you still planning to go to town?”
A bleary nod, as if he hadn’t gotten much sleep thinking about it. “I was just getting dressed when I heard the shot.”
“I’ll help you get the motorcycle,” Rudy offered, moving closer so they wouldn’t have to shout.
“All right. Let me get my shoes on.”
As Shane ducked inside the gloomy interior of his house, Rudy glanced across the cul-de-sac, expecting to see the collie in the faint shadows between the houses, waiting to get at the bones again.
There was nothing there; apparently the dog had decided to move on. Rudy guessed it would find what it wanted, if not on this street then another.
He found himself wondering what effect Wormwood might have on animals… dogs and cats, or birds for that matter.
His eyes rose toward the treetops and telephone wires, scanning.
Now wouldn’t that be something…
He wondered if he would be able to tell the difference between a live bird and an infected one? Would they lose the ability to fly, or come diving down like flocks of kamikazes, attracted to anything with a warm pulse?
God help us if that happens, Rudy thought, his gaze dropping until he found himself looking at Larry’s front door. He supposed he ought to go knock, see if the Hannas were up yet. If Larry and Shane were going into town, it would be best for them to start as early as possible, just in case they ran into trouble.
Rudy shook his head. Just in case… He almost laughed.
In a city of almost 50,000 souls, of course they were going to run into trouble. If Quail Street were any indication, then half of them would already be infected. Predators roaming the streets, trying desperately to get at the other half, the numbers gradually tipping…
The real question — antibiotics notwithstanding — was would they make it back at all?
And if so, what might come following?
Larry was a long time answering his door; so long, in fact, Rudy feared he might have changed his mind and gone back to his old isolationism. Then the sound of disengaging locks issued through the heavy oak and the door creaked open, just an inch or two.
Larry Hanna looked out at him like a man already dead. A man who supposes things can’t possibly get any worse and then finds out he’s wrong.
A long sigh seemed to come out of him, blowing sourly through the crack.
Rudy wondered if he even recognized him.
“I thought I should check on you, Larry. Shane and I were about to go to the Sturling’s to get the motorcycle.”
Larry let the door swing wider. “Come in,” he invited, his face slack, expressionless. “I want to show you something.”
Rudy felt a chill at the flat sound of his neighbor’s voice. He glanced over his shoulder, for the dog or for Shane; any excuse to keep from going inside. The street, however, conspired quietly against him.
“Downstairs,” Larry said, turning toward the darkness, his target rifle carelessly in hand, the heavy stock knocking against the risers as he descended.
Rudy found he had little choice but to follow.
“Those damn junipers,” Larry swore, moving slowly ahead of him, the light in the stairwell turning from blue to gray, threatening to disappear altogether at the bend. “Every year I think about tearing them out. The whole damn lot of them. Ugly, shaggy bushes.” He turned to look at Rudy. “Mark climbed out of them yesterday; did I tell you that?”
“Yes, you did,” Rudy answered, wondering where this was leading.
“And the scratches?” Larry wondered. “I told you about the scratches on his back?”
“I think you may have mentioned it,” Rudy agreed, not certain if he had or hadn’t. A tingling feeling floated down the center of his back, like a premonition. They had come to a halt outside the shelter: Larry on the brief landing while Rudy stood two steps above him, looking down on the pale oval of his face. The dark, haunted eyes…
“Well I thought Mark got those scratches from hiding in the junipers,” Larry explained, the point coming slowly, as if he were telling Rudy why he’d always preferred Sprite to 7-Up. “They’re hell to crawl through, you know. You lose a ball in bunch of junipers, you may as well kiss it goodbye.” His attention seemed to waver, drifting down the wall from Rudy to the door.
Rudy watched him, uncertain. “Larry? What are we doing here?”
The door to the vault clicked open. It was an impressive click: solid and secure, like something you’d hear in the back of a bank. Larry’s eyes found Rudy again.
“Like I said, I want to show you something.”
A soft fan of light opened with the door, spreading with it a thick odor, one which Rudy had become well acquainted with over the last twenty-four hours. It was blood. He felt like he’d waded through oceans of it. Now here was another.
Larry stepped over the threshold, the rifle knocking squarely against the dark steel lip. His shadow grew stilted and monstrous on the painted blocks of the interior wall then stopped, turning back to Rudy.
Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Rudy stepped inside.
“I wanted to clean up those scratches,” Larry said, pointing, “but Jan wouldn’t let me. She absolutely wouldn’t let go of the boy.” He squatted down beside his son and lifted the back of his shirt. “See there,” he said, tracing a group of deep gouges with his finger, looking up at Rudy. “Those aren’t junipers, they’re fingernails.”
Jan Hanna was gazing at Rudy above Mark’s left shoulder. He met her eyes, looked away, but found himself being drawn back to her eyes and the bullethole in the center of her forehead, which was neat enough to have been placed there by God.
Larry let his son’s shirt drop and rose to his feet. He gazed openly at Rudy.
“What do you think?”
“I think,” Rudy had trouble finding his voice, “I think I need to go back outside, Larry.”
Larry shook his head, not denying him passage but confounded, as if for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what had happened. “The scratches aren’t that deep!” he insisted, reaching for the shirt again so Rudy could see. “Look here,” he said, tracing another. “There’s hardly any blood!”
Rudy wasn’t sure what was worse: the sight of Mark’s raw back or the small, glistening hole in the back of his head. When Larry lifted the shirt to show him one, the other disappeared.
“How could those scratches kill him?” Larry demanded, his voice rising now. Indignant. Angry.
“Germs, infection…” Rudy suggested, shaking his head, taking an unsteady step toward the door. “I don’t know. He went through a great deal yesterday. Perhaps it was simply shock.”
“Shock,” Larry whispered, his eyes drifting again, as if this were something he hadn’t considered. A stone he hadn’t turned during the night. His expression narrowed. “Is that possible? He’s just a boy. Not even eight.”
Rudy nodded. From his new position, Jan was no longer staring at him. He could see, however, the terrible damage that Mark had done to her. Several savage bites had been taken before Larry shot him. Her throat opened from jaw to breastbone; the last bloody lump was still in Mark’s mouth.
From the neatness and accuracy of her final wound, Rudy guessed that Larry had put the muzzle to his wife’s forehead and fired before she had a chance to come back; tenderly, as a parting gift from a husband to his wife.
“Do you think it was painful?” Larry asked, looking down at the two of them. “Do you think he suffered?”
“I don’t know,” Rudy replied, staring at Mark’s rabid expression, thinking it certainly hadn’t been very easy on his mother. “If it was shock, he might have been unconscious when he died.”
Larry nodded, satisfied. He turned and set his rifle aside, then picked up a thick woolen blanket. When he turned back to the light there were tears in his eyes, as if his mind hadn’t allowed him to grieve until he understood what killed them. He leaned down and kissed his wife and then his son. An awful sound caught and tore itself from his throat, a sound as close to the end of the world as Rudy could imagine. He found tears on his own face as Larry whispered a husky goodbye and covered his family with the thick gray blanket.
“Even if I make it back from town,” Larry vowed, “I won’t come back to this room. I’ll put a bullet through my head first.” He wiped his face and pointed to a corner of the shelter piled with brown cardboard boxes. “Something crept in and squatted in the shadows over there during the night. I don’t know what it was; a dream, maybe: but it crouched on top of that box and watched me for the longest time… hardly moving, like one of those tree sloths.” Larry looked soberly at Rudy. “I was thinking about killing myself then. What do you suppose that means?”
Rudy shook his head, his eyes moving from Larry to the corner. The top of the highest box looked slightly crushed, dented inward, as if something the size of a bulldog had perched there. “I don’t know,” he heard himself say, imagining what Larry must have gone through during the night, sitting in the shelter with the bodies of his wife and son, their deaths a sudden and violent nightmare. Like nothing a man could prepare himself for… then to have to shoot them on top of that.
Who was to say what he might imagine in a shadowy corner, urging him toward suicide?
“I want you to do a favor for me,” Larry said, picking up his rifle.
For a dreadful moment Rudy was certain he was going to ask him to shoot him, right then and there. To take the terrible burden of life from his shoulders and set him free. Larry had always been a faithful Christian; perhaps the sin of self-destruction terrified him more than Wormwood.
“If I don’t come back tonight, will you burn them like Brian and the others? I know it’s an awful thing to ask, but you’ve always been a good friend and neighbor to us… better than I’ve deserved lately… and I know I can trust you to do it, if you say you will.” Larry glanced around the bloodied clutter of the shelter and sighed. “I hate to think of this as their final resting place.” His eyes came to rest on the blanket and the tears were back, bitter with failure.
“They deserved so much better.”
Shane was waiting for them, his father’s shotgun propped between his knees as he sat on the curb opposite the Hanna’s. When he saw them, he got to his feet, crossed the cul-de-sac and met them at the end of the drive. Rudy told him that Jan and Mark had died during the night. Shane glanced briefly at Larry before directing his eyes toward the asphalt at his feet.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hanna,” he said softly, his voice so low it might have been the wind. He glanced up at Larry again. “Does that mean you won’t be going to town?”
There was no anger or sullen protest this time, only a quiet curiosity and determination, as if he planned on going whether Larry drove him or not. He’d simply learn to drive the motorbike along the way.
“No Shane,” Larry said. “I’ll take you. There’s no reason for me to stay.”
“I thought maybe… you know,” Shane shrugged. “You might want to be with them.”
Larry looked down at the street, giving himself a moment to sort out his emotions.
“I was with them most of the night,” he finally said, and left it at that.
The door to the Sturling house was locked.
They’d done this the previous evening as a precaution against trespassers: locking all the doors and windows in the unoccupied houses. Not because they feared someone might walk in and steal the television or the microwave oven (and with the electricity out, who would bother?), or the food and ammunition (they’d done that themselves), but because it was possible that someone passing by — or worse yet, a group of desperate strangers — might see the plywood reinforcements and decide to take up residence during the night. Someone who wasn’t as neighborly as Keith and Naomi Sturling. Someone who might dig in and take the rest of the street by force.
Of course, if they were that determined, a lock wouldn’t keep them out for long, but they would have to make some noise breaking in. Then again, the city was full of unlocked houses… maybe the effort alone would persuade them to try something along the next block, something easier.
So once they’d collected the bodies for the pyre, they’d locked the houses up as tight as they could and hid the keys in a place where everyone in the cul-de-sac could find them. Just in case.
Rudy felt the underside of the Sturling’s mailbox and found the square of duct tape hiding the house key. He peeled it free and inserted it into the front door.
The house opened up its jaws, expelling a stale black odor.
“I’ll go through and open the garage,” Rudy volunteered. He looked back at the two men huddled on the step behind him and when neither one spoke up or offered to accompany him, Rudy switched on his flashlight and stepped over the threshold.
The blood splashed over the walls and the carpeting had turned dark and corrupt during the night, though this time he made no attempt to follow it. Instead, he strode purposefully across the living room, cut a corner off the dining room, walked straight through the kitchen and reached for a door that would take him two steps down to the concrete pad of the garage. He did this in a matter of seconds, not wanting to linger in the house on his own, already sensing the memories gathering about him like ghosts, waiting for him to stop and look around. The garage, by contrast, felt cleaner. It smelled not of blood or stale abandonment, but of gasoline, rubber tires and dry grass clippings.
Rudy thought he saw something crouched down behind the tool bench, but when he turned his light toward it, it was only a barbeque, a kettle-shaped carapace standing in the corner on three thin legs.
The motorcycle was just where Shane said it would be: pushed to the back of the garage, dusty and dejected, as if no one bothered to ride it much anymore. A Yamaha 350 with fat, knobby tires.
Naomi’s sporty little Mazda was parked in front of it, but with Keith’s pick-up out in the driveway, Rudy thought they’d be able to shift things around enough to free the bike without moving the car.
He walked to the overhead door and disengaged the lock. The door itself was rigged to an electric opener and required some muscle to lift, but once he got it started, Shane and Larry were on the other side to help.
The first thing he saw when he stepped back into the daylight was the border collie, watching from the shadows across the street.
“These are the ones I want you to look for,” Pam said, handing Shane a list with half a dozen drugs spelled out in her careful hand. “The one on the top, the Vancomycin,” she said, pointing, “is the antibiotic I need for your father. It’s intramuscular, so I’m going to need syringes. Pharmacies carry them for diabetics. Bring back the biggest box you can comfortably fit in your backpack.”
“All right,” Shane agreed, frowning at the list, trying to sound out the names in his head.
“The three below it are also antibiotics. The Keflex, Tequin and amoxicillin.” She moved her finger to a second column. “These are painkillers and anesthetics. Morphine, lidocain, novocain. Get everything off the list that you can, but the Vancomycin and morphine are the most important, and the syringes to inject them. If you come back without syringes, the drugs will be of no use to us. Do you understand that?”
Shane nodded. “Yeah, I won’t forget.” He folded the list and put it in his pocket.
She gazed at him for a long moment, until tears began to spill over her lashes.
“Mom,” he said, about to protest, but instead finding himself in a sudden and fierce embrace, as if she didn’t expect to see him again. “I love you,” she told him, looking into his eyes, kissing his face.
“I love you too, Mom.”
“You’re not to take any chances,” she warned, reaching to brush away her tears. “Get in and get out then get yourself back here as quick as you can.”
“I will.”
“I won’t lose the both of you,” she said vehemently, giving him one last kiss before letting go.
Shane went inside to say goodbye to his father and the shut-in stench of the bedroom almost knocked him flat. He lit a match and touched it to the candle beside the bed. His father lay shivering, his body sour with perspiration.
Don’t expect to make any sense out of what he says, his mother had warned. He’s not fully conscious. He may not even recognize you.
But Mike had recognized him. Enough to reach out his good hand and tell him he was sorry they were going to miss the ball game. He just didn’t have the strength to get out of bed. Must be some sort of virus going around.
“That’s all right, Dad,” Shane said, thinking that the last baseball game his father had taken him to must have been at least five years ago, when he was eleven or twelve. “You just stay here in bed and let Mom take care of you. I’m going to ride into town with Mr. Hanna and see if I can get you some medicine.”
“You’re a good boy, Shane,” his father grinned, the hollow shadows spreading across his face. “You’ve always been a good boy.” The hand slipped away, back to the sweat-stained sheets, and his eyes closed.
Standing beside the bed, the candle flickering on the nightstand, Shane felt a terrible constriction in his throat as he watched his father struggle within the grip of his delirium. His skin looked flushed, almost burning.
On impulse, Shane reached out and touched his forehead.
Mike Dawley’s eyes flew open and Shane jumped back, startled, his heart hammering, his fingertips felt blistered and numb, as if he’d just plugged into a bad electrical circuit.
His father was staring at him, watching him back away toward the door with an intensity that unnerved him.
Shane remembered the candle and walked back to the nightstand to blow it out.
The last image he had of his father was a grin, and then the room went dark.
He walked slowly to the door, arms out slightly, feeling his way. There came a soft sound behind him: fingernails running down damp sheets.
His father’s soft laughter. “Son?”
Shane hesitated, halfway across the room. “Yeah Dad?”
“My fingers… I can feel them growing back.”
Larry kick-started the bike and nodded for Shane to climb on.
With the front end pointed toward Kennedy Street and the engine burning gasoline, the surviving members of Quail Street gathered around the departing pair and wished them luck. Amid the final handshakes and embraces, farewells were exchanged and promises solemnly reaffirmed, yet there was a reluctance to let them go, a sense that the trip was fated to go badly.
Opposed to this was a gathering momentum, as if they could no more remain than hold back the sun, which was already climbing the eastern sky, scorching away the hours until nightfall.
Larry picked up his feet and the bike began to roll.
The wind brushed his face, warmed by the sun.
He glanced over his shoulder at his house, feeling it slip away like a stone off his chest. He had a premonition that he would never set foot in it again.
It was, he decided, not an altogether unpleasant feeling.
As Rudy watched them go, he also wondered if he would ever see them again. The odds, he supposed, were about a thousand to one. He looked at Pam Dawley’s face, at the toll the night had taken on it, and wondered if there would be anything left for them to come back to.
Feeling depressed, he turned to shepherd his wife and children back toward the safety of the house, the buzz of the motorcycle distant, already fading into memory.
Perhaps Larry was right, he ruefully reflected. All their plans and efforts…
Perhaps they were nothing but folly.
The plan, as it had originally been proposed, was for Shane and Larry to follow a route similar to that Rudy and the others had taken to 7-Eleven, along Kennedy down to where it met Valley View, then navigating that arterial past the former convenience mart to Long’s drugstore, six blocks further on 4th.
This, however, was debated and discarded as too risky due to the densely populated neighborhoods they would have to pass through along the way, not to mention the large apartment complex directly across from the shopping center itself.
Long’s had always been convenient; it was where most of them had gone to have their prescriptions filled, but now it was likely a deathtrap, if not a burned-out cinder.
Pam had then suggested they take a right instead of a left at Kennedy and go west over the ridge and down the other side, where they could hook up with County Road 27 and then the old highway. The land out that way was mostly ranches and farms, with only a few new housing developments clustered amid the empty pastures.
If they stuck to the outskirts and navigated around the congested streets of the city, there were any number of smaller drugstores they might reach.
Consulting the yellow pages, they found three that might prove relatively easy to access. The first was the Medicine Shoppe in the Summertides shopping center on 27 next to the Summertides golf course. A small pharmacy sandwiched between a hair salon and a pizza parlor; small but specialized, exceedingly well-stocked.
The shopping center itself was small and somewhat isolated. Built in the early 60’s (at the same time as the golf course), it drew its lifeblood from the upscale RV park and condominiums which had sprung up around the fringes of the links. Getting in and out would not be a problem.
The second option was Hoilman’s Drug in the tiny neighboring community of Brace, three or four miles further on. Brace itself was little more than a bump on the old highway; a bump which just so happened to have a drive-in burger stand and a Mom and Pop grocery. The drug store (also a Mom and Pop affair) clung like a concrete parasite to the side of the grocery store; not exactly promising — no one on Quail Street had ever found occasion to step inside — but once again, it was small and easy to approach.
This wasn’t the case for the third option if both Summertides and Brace fell through. If that happened, Larry would have to turn the bike south toward the state highway, which in turn would bring them back toward the city and the Fred Meyer supercenter off Columbia Avenue. Fred Meyer was likely to stock the items they needed, but as large as it was, positioned at the northwest corner of the city, it would naturally attract more people. Worse still, the pharmacy counter lay deep within the store.
Both Larry and Shane agreed that feeling their way about the darkened aisles of a dead and windowless supercenter didn’t hold much appeal. Dead or not, it was apt to be full of surprises, most of them unpleasant.
Nevertheless, it would be a last-ditch effort before turning back to Quail Street or coming up with something on their own. To that effect, Pam reminded them of the clusters of medical buildings further up Columbia. Doctor’s offices and clinics that might be worth considering, to which Rudy shook his head and put forth the opinion it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Larry concluded the discussion, stating simply that he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
The first dead man came stumbling at them along Kennedy.
They’d covered less than a quarter mile, seeing nothing more unusual than a Fed-Ex van turned on its side in the grassy ditch. There was a bloody handprint smeared against the bright white panel of the door, a cracked cataract where the windshield had been, but these were in no way conclusive. There was no body so they continued on after a cursory glance, only to encounter a man with a matching Fed-Ex patch on his grass-stained blouse around the next bend. He was peering into a battered mailbox.
Larry slowed the bike to a walk and the man turned, close enough to read the name stitched above his left breast pocket. Leo. Leo had an ugly gash on his forehead and an angry slash down the side of his face. Neither of them looked particularly deep, but there was no mistaking the fever of Wormwood in his eyes.
Shane glanced into the mailbox in passing and saw something that looked dark and sticky. A piece of liver or kidney, his mind whispered; something pulled from a torn abdominal cavity. No telling what Leo was trying to do; mail it, perhaps. It was impossible to say.
Shane felt a strong urge to use his father’s 9mm on the man; snuff him out of existence like a spider poised in the bathroom sink; but the fact was they were likely to come across a great many such victims on the road ahead and their ammunition was extremely limited, so he held on to Larry and let Leo slip away.
It was a decision he’d later come to regret.
Half a mile past Hudson Pond, at the crest of the ridge, there was a wide gravel turnabout off the shoulder of the road where drivers could pull off and enjoy a panoramic view of the city. It was a popular place for teenagers to come and park, isolated enough to drink beer and grope one another while the city lights sparkled below.
Larry and Shane found a car parked there as they approached, its front bumper right up to the battered and graffiti-covered guardrail. An old Impala with a torn vinyl roof and a lone silhouette propped up behind the wheel. Larry nosed the Yamaha in well away from it and let the engine sputter to a halt.
The wind rose to fill the silence. A hazy, yellow-colored wind.
Shane eased himself off the back of the bike and Larry swung his leg over, both of them assessing the shape in the Impala before stepping to the guardrail and turning their attention to the city.
“Would you look at that,” Larry whispered, awed by the sight, to which Shane could only shake his head.
The city lay in a wide valley and spread itself out to them like a corpse on an examination table. Whole sections of it were frantically burning, the flames visible to the naked eye even from four or five miles away. Other areas, now stunted and withered, seemed content to smolder, an eerie mist lying over the streets in an unsettling veil. The hand of God descending, only this time it wouldn’t be placated with a splash of lamb’s blood on the door, no more than it would be content with the first-born son. Wormwood, they could see, played no favorites. It simply opened its jaws and devoured everything. No one was safe because no one had built up an immunity to death.
Still, there were large portions of the city that looked untouched by the disease, though this was likely not the case, no more than Quail Street had escaped it. They were simply host to quieter horrors, those content to remain indoors and out of sight. The kind that Larry had left behind in his basement.
All it took was one dead body. A single viable corpse to take root…
And here were the results, spread out before them.
Twenty-four hours and the city was in ruins.
Only God, Larry decided, could work that quickly, and God had turned out to be something of a disappointment; a downright bastard, erasing people and cities like lines from a blackboard. Equations that didn’t balance.
He and Shane gazed at God’s handiwork until they couldn’t take it any longer, until each blink of the eye brought some new atrocity into focus: a church in flames, a shopping center collapsed upon itself, a park or schoolyard strewn with bodies.
And beneath it all, the sound of screams… the steady tat-tat-tat of small arms fire…
Carried up to them on the wings of the wind.
The man in the Impala had no face, just a ragged scream blasted into his skull large enough to thread an arm through. A shotgun lay stiffly against the steering wheel, both barrels fired and then fallen into a reverent silence.
Shane wondered if he’d ever get used to such sights, or if they’d cling to him like ghosts, haunting him until he sought the same unbearable release.
There was a note pinned to the man’s chest, folded neatly and addressed: To Whom It May Concern.
Larry knew what it would say the moment he saw it.
Dear Concerned,
I can’t live with myself. I shot my wife and two sons, and even though they had the disease and it was the right thing to do, I can’t get the images out of my head. I see their faces and I hear the sound of the rifle and I know there’s nothing left for me…
He’d written that much himself, scribbled it on the back of a canned food label while a grinning thing watched from its perch in the corner. He’d coughed up those awful, despairing words and then he’d burned them, ashamed, unable to take that final step, to even suggest it on paper.
Yet the idea had never left his mind, and part of him wondered if he’d gone ahead with this trip on the chance he’d never return. The same part of him that still believed that suicide was God’s one unpardonable sin.
He looked at the man in the Impala. At the devastating hole where his face had been.
In the end, what could a simple note say?
That he was in torment, in pain?
They could see that well enough themselves.
Shane reached in and unpinned the sheet from the man’s bloody shirt. As he started to unfold it, Larry snatched it from him, unable to take on the man’s burden. He refolded it and stuffed it into his back pocket, unread.
Shane looked at him, puzzled.
Larry shook his head. “It doesn’t concern us,” he said, turning back to the bike.
The north side of the ridge dropped quickly down a canyon and spit them out at a stalled collision. A twisted meeting of pickup, car and trailer which had appeared around a blind corner and sent them skidding toward the ditch.
Shane felt the bike begin to shimmy through a spill of broken glass, the engine protesting as Larry downshifted and they sputtered past the chrome hook of a partially detached bumper, the Yamaha finally arriving at a tentative stop on the graveled shoulder.
“Are you all right?” Larry called back, letting the motor drop to a steady idle.
“All right,” Shane agreed, though in truth it had been a very near thing. He felt lightheaded and sick, his arms and legs trembling while his heart beat thunderously against his eardrums.
Wreckage was sprawled across the roadway, the pickup and trailer jackknifed and flipped over with the hood of the Cadillac folded deep inside, as if the long luxury car had come sailing down the canyon and around the corner just as the pickup had been struggling onto the roadway. Bits of plastic, lumps of glass and crumpled metal had been thrown about like weightless confetti. There were dented cans of food, burst batteries, scatters of loose bullets… none of which had done them much good in the end. Articles of clothing and personal items had been thrown all over the shoulder and into the bordering field like leftovers from a garage sale.
Larry and Shane more or less paddled the motorcycle through the debris, touching a foot down here and a foot down there until they were clear of the worst of it. Larry spotted something of interest along the far shoulder and brought the bike to a halt, pointing it out to Shane.
“What is it?” he asked, uncertain. “Some sort of explosive?”
“No, road flares,” Larry told him, adding they might come in handy if they ended up in a cave like Fred Meyer. “Why don’t you grab them?” he suggested. “I’ll move the bike forward a bit in case someone comes barreling down that hill.”
“All right,” Shane agreed, pushing himself off the back of the seat.
“If you hear a car coming, get yourself clear of that wreck,” Larry warned, angling the Yamaha toward the south shoulder, giving it a little gas. When he had it a safe distance from the crash, he turned and saw Shane crouched down on the pavement, gathering up flares.
Something seemed to distract Shane and he paused, his head angled toward the heart of the collision. Hurriedly, he picked up the last few flares then trotted quickly back to Larry and the bike, his face a pale grimace.
“What’s the matter?” Larry asked, concerned.
Shane cocked his head toward the twisted steel.
“There are still things moving around in there
Summertides was only another mile or so ahead, but it was a dangerous mile, with the passing houses gathering closer to one another, marching increasingly toward the road. Shane and Larry saw bodies wandering like sunstricken hoboes along the shoulders of the road, across the road itself, and deep inside the open pastures.
Along one of the last stretches of undeveloped land, they came across a small herd of cattle that lay in bloodied lumps, as if the animals had wandered inadvertently into a minefield. There were people too — Wormwood casualties — crawling amongst the torn remains, feeding off the raw lumps of flesh. They began to take notice of the passing motorcycle and Larry opened the throttle a little more. There was no speedometer, but to Shane it felt like thirty five or forty. Fast enough to break bones or scrape off skin if something got in front of them.
Fortunately, nothing did.
Summertides, however, was a different story; its fate not at all as Shane or Larry had imagined.
Normally, the drive past the golf course was like cruising alongside a large and sprawling park. The landscape was green and well-tended, as desirable to the eye as the groups of condominiums that had been built up along its westward border. Quiet, unobtrusive, with gated cul-de-sacs and discreet privacy signs to discourage idlers and passing tourists.
Not so any longer…
Wormwood reminded them that Summertides, despite its isolation and well-groomed links, was actually a densely-populated residential district; an easy fact to overlook because the people who could afford to live there were well-to-do and (by and large) of retirement age. They were a population that enjoyed itself quietly and — aside from a round of golf or a summer cocktail party — indoors. Even the RV park on the south side kept itself neat and well-behaved, filled with white-haired retirees and migrating snowbirds who had more money invested in their trailers than most people did in their homes and savings accounts.
And when Wormwood hit, it cut through the place like a buzzsaw.
Because the residents were aging, there was a much greater incidence of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease… the sort of conditions that will lead to heart attacks and strokes… which in turn will generate lots of dead bodies, especially if a sudden shock like Wormwood descends and they can’t get to a doctor or hospital.
In a place like Summertides, the disease spreads quickly and there are very few places to hide. Condominiums and RVs do not make good shelters or fortresses. They peel and fall apart like particle board slapped with a cheap veneer.
And after a single day, the former residents had come spilling out to wander the greens and fairways (not to mention the aisles of the adjoining shopping center) like open house — with free buffet! — at a new retirement villa.
A group of four or five pressed through a hedge of arborvitaes along the shoulder of the old highway. Blue-haired women swinging jeweled purses and balding men in ball caps and tennis whites; gruesome smears of blood across their hands and faces, hardening to a deep crimson down the front of their clothes.
One of the women stumbled and the rest tripped over her, tumbling down on brittle bones into a shallow drainage ditch. Larry backpedaled the bike while Shane fired several shots from the 9mm. The bullets punched brutally through their withered flesh, opening bloodless wounds and tossing them back, but they all got up again.
“Shit! Look out!” Shane swore, swinging the pistol over Larry’s head and firing point-blank at an old woman who looked a bit like a disheveled Angela Lansbury. The shot snapped her head back as her fingernails scratched faint white lines down the sleeve of Larry’s suede jacket. Another — this one too torn and savaged to resemble anything but a corpse — reached over the fallen Ms. Lansbury with a grin that came from having half her cheek ripped away. Shane saw a yellowjacket crawl angrily from her nostril and take flight before she too received a merciful bullet.
Yet for every one that fell, three more popped through the hedge to take their place, attracted by the motorcycle and the sound of gunfire, by the smell of warm blood.
By the time Shane’s guns were empty, a vast, white-capped sea had appeared before them, pouring frantically out of the entrance to the shopping center, still a quarter-mile distant. Robbed of any individuality they once may have possessed, the overwhelming mob came boiling down the dull gray course of the highway: running, limping and trampling over one another in their irresistible need to get at the last two living souls left in sight, to spread the disease to every crack and corner of the landscape — a solid wave of Wormwood, like the scourging waters of a burst dam.
“Oh my God…” Shane whispered, staring into the shrieking face of it, his blood ice cold.
Larry swore despondently and turned the bike around, retreating before they’d even laid eyes on the pharmacy. He shouted for Shane to hold on and gunned the Yamaha back the way they’d come, the back end dragging something with white hair and a polo shirt that was determined to come with them. It held on stubbornly, pulling itself up until the knobby tread of the rear tire began sheering away its sagging face, leaving a sticky pulp on the fender.
When there was nothing but the raw scream of a mouth left, it finally fell away, but not without taking the fender with it.
Shane watched it grow smaller behind them. A lump on the road that got to its feet — the yellow stripe of the fender still clutched in both hands — then went tumbling blindly off the shoulder.
When they were well clear of the infestation, Larry let the motorcycle coast to a gentle stop under a shady line of elms alongside the highway. He cut the engine and drew a shaky breath.
“My God,” he whispered, head down in defeat, or prayer. “This thing’s worse than we thought. A lot worse.”
Shane agreed that it was, his voice slow, without much emotion.
Larry glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere near that pharmacy.”
Shane shook his head, trying to halt the endless replay of every bullet, the shudder of the bike as the back tire erased an old man’s face in a matter of seconds. It wasn’t much like sniping with a rifle from his rooftop: where he remained distant and untouchable, like an angry god. This was personal, just beyond his fingertips. He closed his eyes and saw bruised fingernails scratching through suede; his arm shifting as a bright spray of blood caught the midday sun.
“We could try a different approach; ride right over the golf course, maybe; but to tell you the truth, I don’t think it would make a lick of difference. The whole development is overrun.”
“How come there are so many of them?” Shane wondered. “I mean, I was expecting some people, but they were all dead!”
Larry nodded. “A bunch of old folks sitting around in their trailers; I doubt they had much of a chance. When it started it probably went through the place like a forest fire, jumping from one to the next.”
A breeze came up, moving through the branches above them. It carried with it a tainted smell, like scorched sulfur. Shane felt a tingle on the back of his neck and checked the stretch of road behind them, certain that something was still following, something in a polo shirt looking for its face. The old highway was empty though, at least as far as the last bend.
“So what now?” Larry asked. “The drugstore in Brace?”
“That’s the plan,” Shane answered, though after the mess they’d just run into, their plans suddenly seemed naïve, laughable, like something cobbled together out of bent nails and twine.
“Fine by me,” Larry agreed, “but I gotta tell you I’m not overly optimistic. This whole trip may turn out to be a wash.”
Shane sat silently on the back of the bike, willing it forward.
“But like I said,” Larry shrugged, raising a leg to kick the engine to life, “that’s fine by me.”
The country between Summertides and Brace was almost peaceful, though it was surely a trick of the light; a deception, the look of a population in hiding.
They passed through low, green pastureland, the houses two and three stories and sold with enough acreage to ride horses or raise a fair amount of livestock. They stood widely-spaced and well back from the highway, landscaped with duck ponds and greenhouses, accented with tire swings and vegetable gardens.
Some of the houses were boarded up, nailed shut with rough planks and sheets of plywood, like the ones they’d left behind on Quail Street. One even seemed to wink at them as they passed: a heavy curtain parting briefly in an upstairs window and then falling, revealing a pale white oval that looked to Shane like a damaged pupil. He raised a hand to it in greeting, but it didn’t return the gesture. Most likely the house simply wished them on their way.
Others they passed simply looked dead — squared-off tombstones jutting out of the landscape with a decided cant or vacancy to their timbers, as if something had gotten in while they were sleeping and eaten away at their supports. The windows seemed glazed and listless and the doors hung open in dull surprise.
One had burned right down to the foundation, leaving nothing but a sharp smell in the air and a deep scorch on the ground. The trees standing around it (though neither birch nor willow) seemed to be weeping, as if they’d lost something unimaginable.
The smell deepened and a short distance further they came across another smoky ruin, then a third, smoldering away on a patchy field of ashes. This time even the trees had perished; what was left of them looked like fingers, black and arthritic, clutching desperately at the open face of the sky.
As they continued west, Larry and Shane saw two small skeletons heaped beside a charred post that might once have supported a mailbox; the bones black, carbonized, grinning bitterly at the warped pavement.
The nearer they got to Brace, the blacker the landscape became until, topping the last low rise, it became obvious that there was no township of Brace any longer.
The ashes were still hot in places, but it was apparent that the fire hadn’t broken out the previous day, touched off by the arrival of Wormwood. It was several days, if not a week old and appeared to have started in the northwest quarter of town, where the old fruit warehouses were stacked together. From there it had marched eastward, blown on the prevailing winds, through the center of town.
Seasoning in the sun for over forty years, the timbers of the drive-in burger stand had gone up as if eager to burn, leaving a fine, almost white layer of ash in its shallow foundation. Across the street, the market and drugstore had collapsed into one another, leaving a scorched pile of rubble.
Those who had come out to fight the fire had perished in the streets, their bodies baked black and then devoured to the bone. They lay where they had fallen, alone or in pairs.
For Shane and Larry, after Summertides, Brace was like another room in Hell: grayer, grittier, and completely desolate. There was no life within its borders: no people, no pets or livestock, not even scavengers such as birds or insects. The conflagration had consumed everything but brick and stone, leaving nothing for them to pull apart or bicker over.
When Larry let the engine die at the crossroads, all they could hear was the soft abrasion of the wind, rising and falling through the barren streets, rubbing and erasing what little remained.
The hardest part for Shane to digest was not the death and destruction, but the simple fact that they had no idea — none at all, in drawing up their plans — that Brace no longer existed. Six, maybe seven miles from Quail Street and they hadn’t a clue.
Before Wormwood, before the electricity went out, they would have been watching the fire on television before it had a chance to jump the roof of the first warehouse.
Since then, the world had gotten bigger. Much, much bigger.
Away from his parents, from his home, Shane was just beginning to realize the complications…
Brace had burned to the ground because cities and towns were no longer connected. In fact, the underlying glue that held civilization itself together was rapidly dissolving, and he suddenly remembered that Chicago, like Brace, no longer existed.
Without television, without electricity and the internet, what else might be happening in the world? There was no way to tell. How many other places — towns and cities whose names he’d known since childhood — had unknowingly slipped off the face of the planet?
Aside from bits of gossip or hearsay from people passing through those places, the only way to tell would be to travel there himself. And what were the odds, these days, of purchasing a plane ticket to New York or Washington, DC?
He might take a car or motorcycle, but would the roads be clear, or bottle-necked with frozen traffic? Would he be able to get fuel, or spare parts?
Under his own steam, how long would it take to walk or cycle to the East Coast? Three months? Six? A year?
He had no idea.
Each question posed ten more, each more complicated than the last.
Forget about travel for its own sake, or out of simple curiosity; instead, think about what was going to happen when May turned into November and a cold, hard winter descended?
This far north, it was going to get cold, it was going to snow…
Would the power be back on by then, or would he be living like a caveman, spending his days gathering food and firewood? Foraging the ashes and ruins by himself or with a small group of others, protecting their stores and their last remaining bullets like their distant, distant ancestors had protected a single spark of fire.
Without bullets the legions of infected would get a lot closer…
Eventually, they’d have to start killing them with clubs and spears, with rocks or their bare hands.
Which, of course, would dramatically increase the chances of becoming infected oneself.
These thoughts spiraled through Shane’s head as he looked out over Brace. At the fate of one small town that hardly merited a dot on the map.
“Well?” Larry sighed. What do you think? Fred Meyer?”
Shane nodded.
There were two ways to get to Highway 12 out of Brace.
The first was to go back the way they had come, riding east until they met up with the old highway and then turning south. It was likely the least obstructed and the least traveled route; unfortunately, it ended at Summertides and they had no desire to repeat that experience.
The other route led directly south, putting them in the eastbound entry lane within half a mile. Logic (and the impassable situation at Summertides) seemed to make this the obvious choice, but it was potentially slower and more dangerous as well. Being one of 2 or 3 westward evacuation routes from the city, it would not be unreasonable to guess that good old 12 might be something of a graveyard by now. All it would take was one bad accident to start a chain reaction that would put traffic at a complete standstill. Take those frightened people, all sitting in their cars with nowhere to go, add a disgruntled corpse or two, and what you got was a bloody snowball gathering mass and momentum as it rolled back into town, carrying whole families off with it as it went.
On the other hand, they might expect the lanes running east to be relatively clear, or at least passable. No doubt some median jumping had occurred, but how many people would actually risk driving against oncoming traffic?
Most would have sat obediently in their cars, confident in the knowledge that Highway 12’s four lanes narrowed to two at Norton, a scant six miles further on, which would have been cause enough for backup and delay.
“What about Autumn Creek Road?” Shane suggested, the two of them debating their options. “If we can make it across the river, it’ll take us right to Fred Meyer’s back parking lot.”
Larry considered it. Autumn Creek Road was a narrow, two-lane passage sandwiched between the river and a high, muscular ridge, the steep uniformity of the later broken by twisted gullies and rocky canyons as it rose westward from the city. There was a green belt of land running along the eroded base of the ridge, containing a few orchards and private homes, but because it was prone to flooding, it had remained sparsely populated.
“We’ll still have to take the highway for two or three miles,” Larry said, “and hope at least one of the bridges is passable… but I think it’s worth a try, depending on what we find along Highway 12.”
Shane nodded. “Let’s do it then.”
Larry smiled and kick-started the bike. “Aye-aye, Captain.”
They puttered past the ghostly ruins of the drive-in, searching for the road out of Brace. They passed it once then found it circling back, searching the area where Larry last remembered it. It appeared as a warped slab threading its way through a singed copse of cottonwoods.
A dead skunk lay just beyond the first bend, flattened down to a sunbeaten smell hovering over a flyblown matting in the pavement. As they passed it, Larry said something he didn’t quite catch; though Shane understood his pointing finger well enough.
The shapes of several cars and trucks loomed ahead, backed up along the east and westbound entry lanes and on both shoulders as well, as if patiently waiting for a ferry.
There were slow silhouettes moving amongst the gridlock, owners reluctant to abandon their blocked vehicles, even after death. Not many, but a few.
“Better get those guns ready,” Larry advised.
The man with the potbelly and the “Live Free or Die!” t-shirt was the first to take notice of their approach. He had wedged himself into an angled space between a pickup and a camper, but when he broke free he came at them at a run. This was nothing like the infirm and elderly shuffle they had encountered at Summertides, but something which — if he struck them — might well knock them off the motorcycle like a rhino charging a Jeep.
He didn’t look particularly damaged either, Shane noticed; more like he’d died of exposure or boredom inside his car rather than falling prey to the ravages of the masses. There was a dark smudge of dried blood or oil at the corner of his mouth, as if he’d been eating something raw or combustible, but that was all.
Swinging the shotgun around, Shane leveled it at the stretched eagle on the man’s t-shirt, waiting until he was within fifteen yards of them before thundering off his first shot. It struck the man across the chest in a bloodied pattern that clipped the tail feathers and the “Live Free” portion of his shirt, but as a deterrent, it was about as effective as a handful of gravel flung at a 16 pound bowling ball.
Shane raised the barrel slightly and fired again, this time from less than ten feet away.
This had the desired effect of getting the man’s head rolling in the opposite direction, but the legs and overstuffed t-shirt were still coming at them, packed with enough deadweight and momentum to hit their right flank dead on.
Larry goosed the throttle and the bike hopped neatly forward, almost tumbling Shane off the back. The corpse sailed past them, crashing with grim finality in the dry and thorny weeds beyond the shoulder of the road.
By the time Shane regained his balance, two more of the atrocities had appeared. Where they’d come from he hadn’t a clue, but they were badly burned, so blistered and charred that they looked more like worms than human beings. Bald mutations crawled out of a radioactive desert; naked yet sexless.
He supposed they must have come from Brace.
Larry was able to maneuver around them, leaving the crowded asphalt and angling down the soft slope of the shoulder. Once there, and through a shallow screen of trees, they found themselves faced with a seamless wall of traffic, a westward exodus of empty cars which had been hopelessly stalled by something beyond their sight and comprehension.
Larry faltered, uncertain which direction to take to get around them. The line seemed to stretch, solid and unbroken, for hundreds of yards in either direction. The sputtering sound of the idling engine, now out in the open, began drawing unwanted attention.
“Which way?” he shouted to Shane, hoping the kid had a better vantage than he did, though this seemed unlikely: both of them occupying a single seat on the same motorcycle.
“Left!” Shane shouted back, firing his father’s 9mm at a woman in shorts and a summer blouse approaching from that same direction.
The bullet knocked her down and Larry drove over her neck, feeling her hands flutter at his ankles even as the weight of the bike passed over her.
A boy with curly blonde hair, his iPod headphones still clipped to his ears, came bounding out of the line of cars like a wolf cub, his mouth an infected sore that had ruptured and turned black in the sunlight. Shane saw that the boy was going to catch them; that, in all likelihood, a single bite from his swollen mouth would be enough to infect an entire city.
He tried to bring him down with the shotgun but found he couldn’t turn far enough on the seat to get him in his sights; not even with the handgun. Faced with this dilemma — of feeling diseased fingernails drag him off the back of the motorcycle or jumping off himself — Shane shouted for Larry to keep going and took his chances on the later.
The Yamaha wasn’t moving fast, certainly no better than 7 or 8 miles per hour across the uneven terrain, but Shane knew he was heading for a crash as soon as he and the bike parted company. The knobby rear tire, stripped of its fender, caught the inside of his thigh with an excruciating burn and from there it was just a matter of controlling his fall as best he could. There were two or three impossible strides, then his ankle turned on a loose rock and the next thing he knew he was choking on dust, all the breath knocked out of him. Curled up in a defensive ball, the shotgun and pistol flown from his grasp, Shane felt the blonde boy stumble over him and go sprawling just as gracelessly, throwing up another cloud of dust.
Shane realized that he probably had bare seconds left to live and the thought jolted him to his feet, unaware of the burn in his thigh, the swell of his ankle and the myriad scrapes and contusions all over his body.
He was aware that the blonde boy was getting rapidly to his feet.
And that he no longer had a gun to defend himself.
Forty feet away, Larry had brought the motorcycle to an awkward halt, he had unholstered one of his own guns and was busy firing it into the empty dust and sky, but to Shane these things seemed distant and unimportant, incapable of touching him.
The world around Shane seemed to shrink down to a scuffled patch of dry weeds, and in a panic, he searched amongst them for his guns, knowing they had to be somewhere near.
The blonde boy broke into a predatory lope, coming at him with his mouth open and his arms outstretched.
Larry was firing his gun. Shane felt one of the bullets whiz past his face like an angry hornet. Something fell heavily to the ground behind him and he stumbled over it; he went down into the embrace of its soft putrescence.
Then the blonde boy was on top of him, the two of them grappling.
Shane managed to get a knee up between them as he caught hold of the boys flailing arms, screaming out loud with the terror and effort it took to keep the snarling face at bay. Ironically, with his leg folded against his chest and the weight of the boy pressing down on him, Shane glimpsed the polished steel of the hunting knife strapped just below his knee. Its rounded butt close enough to see his distorted reflection in, though it might have been on a mountaintop in Tibet for all the good it would do him now; he couldn’t relinquish his hold on his opponent long enough to grasp it.
His opponent…
This boy, surely no older than 12 or 13… the awful black cavity of his mouth snapping over him like the beak of a squid or an octopus, leaning closer until Shane feared the infection would drool down onto his face. The boy seemed to have no saliva though, just a dry and feverish rot that made Shane gag when he could no longer escape it.
A shadow flickered by, followed by a succession of gunshots that sounded like God Himself was standing over him, harvesting His bounty with a Smith & Wesson instead of a scythe. The blonde boy was dealt an unseen blow from above and his mouth seemed to exhale from the force of it. His face froze, slackened, then all the tension went out of him like a raft quickly deflating.
A thin strand of something that might have been blood began to descend from his mouth and Shane pitched the corpse aside. It rolled over into the dust with the grip of Larry’s own knife protruding from the back of its skull.
Shane was on his feet again in an instant, wiping frantically at his face for fear that some of the boy’s fluids might have splattered on him. There was a dead woman in his shadow, face-down in the dirt with a pair of stained bicycle shorts stretched over the ponderous width of her thighs.
“Are you all right?” Larry asked, sparing Shane the briefest of glances before taking a shot at an approaching state trooper: a man so badly mutilated that, aside from knocking him down, there was no way of telling where the bullet impacted.
“I think so,” Shane replied, then a bright note of panic asserted itself. “I don’t know!” He looked at his hands and saw a faint smear of something that might have issued from the boy, though he himself was oozing blood from several places: shallow cuts and abrasions sustained during his abrupt dismount and fall. He had no concussion or broken bones, he could walk or run if he had to… but was he all right? Had something irreversible been passed to him from the boy? It was a chilling thought, and his first impulse was to run straight to the river — winding its usual course, 50 or 60 yards away, completely unaffected by recent events — and scrub himself clean with both hands. At the same time, however, he knew such measures were useless. If the disease was in him, then it was in him, and all the water in the world wasn’t going to help. The antibiotics they were after might (he had to believe so for his father’s sake), but the truth was no one knew how Wormwood traveled or what affect it had upon the living. He would either get sick and die or go on living. It was an uncertainty he was going to have to get used to.
Meanwhile, the state trooper was slowly getting up again.
“Find your guns,” Larry advised and stepped forward to put his last chamber into the man’s forehead.
Shane looked up from his hands. More shapes were lurching eagerly down the embankment: slowly or not so slowly, depending on their condition.
“Make it quick!” Larry snapped, reloading his gun. “I’ll get the bike started.”
Shane started pacing the area, finding the shotgun almost immediately, but having more difficulty with his dad’s 9mm. When one of the gruesome shapes got too close he took a step back and shot it in the head, by luck finding his lost pistol underfoot, hiding in a patch of goldenrod.
He snatched it up and ran toward Larry.
So in fits and stops, in gunfire and frustration, they searched for a gap wide enough to maneuver the bike across the westbound lanes, finding one at last half a mile from where they’d come out of Brace.
For the most part the cars they’d passed had been abandoned, discarded when they’d become mired in the gridlock, but there were still nightmares to be found, enough to spawn a dark city of dreams.
Some were bloody, torn to pieces and buzzing with flies. Unrecognizable.
Others were trapped in a kind of limbo or purgatory inside their cars, blocked by the proximity of neighboring vehicles or because they were too young to have ever worked a lock or a door handle. Infants and toddlers still buckled into their boosters and car seats, their plump hands slapping angrily at the glass, smearing it, wanting to be let out. Their heads loomed, swollen and bruised looking, like overripe fruit.
The rest wandered amongst the fields and along the highway — amnesiatic travelers who no longer remembered where they were going or where they’d come from — excited by the bright movement of the motorcycle, but unable to cross or negotiate the solid maze of stalled vehicles.
At one point, not long before they found the gap, Larry braked abruptly beside the flank of a smashed blue Corolla, no different in Shane’s eyes than any of the other vehicles they’d passed. Two adult figures, bloody and broken, lay slumped in the front seat while two teenaged girls scratched and clawed in the back, agitated by bike’s proximity. Larry pulled his revolver from its holster and emptied it into the interior.
When the gun stopped firing, the girls lay in silent tangles.
“What did you do that for?” Shane asked, aghast at the senseless waste of ammunition.
Larry reloaded the gun. “I knew them,” he said, his voice haunted and hollow, his fingers trembling as he fit fresh bullets, one by one, into the warm cylinder. “Dick and Shauna Masterson… their daughters Tammy and Tina.” He closed the revolver and put it back in its holster. “They belonged to our church. I’ve known them since the girls were in kindergarten.”
Shane nodded, not sure what to say.
Larry shook his head as if trying to clear it of a lingering fog, an unsettling dream in which he’d gunned down two young girls for reasons he could no longer recall. “This is not at all what I had in mind,” he said aloud, cryptically, and with a measure of doubt. The same Larry that Shane had seen walk distractedly out of his house that morning.
Shane was about to ask him what he meant, but before he could Larry’s hands settled on the grips and they were off again.
They crossed the highway in front of a Greyhound bus that had turned on its side and slid across both westbound lanes. There was evidence of collision, a mass of scorched metal joined to its undercarriage, but the bus had held its ground, quietly burning then guttering where it lay. It offered them a gap of 3 or 4 feet where traffic had streamed around it then tried to get back on the roadway, some having more luck at this than others.
Larry and Shane paused to look inside the Greyhound’s shattered front window, though what they saw huddled in the back was unclear. It moved, however. To Shane it looked like a giant spider, its many arms and legs poised and trembling, ready to strike if they wandered too near. To Larry, it was simply a bloody and writhing mass, as if all the passengers had been ground into hamburger and were slowly reassembling themselves into a form that might one day hope to crawl.
The smell, charred and oily, yet at the same time redolent of a backyard barbeque, reminded them how long it had been since they’d last eaten. This was an uneasy thought and they hurried past as if it had been whispered with a sly grin from one of the shattered windows.
The eastbound lanes, by contrast, were relatively clear and allowed them to make quick progress to the Autumn Creek exit, traveling at times up to 35 mph and speeding past most of the situations they’d had to use a gun for beyond the opposite lanes.
The short spur spanning the swollen river and linking Highway 12 with Autumn Creek Road was even better, and once they crossed the river they were able to take something of a breather, breaking food out of the improvised saddlebags of their backpacks and filling their pockets from the dwindling supply of ammunition. They found, with dismay, that of the 100 or so rounds they’d left with, over half were already gone, and there was still the return trip to consider.
“Maybe Fred Meyer carries ammunition with its sporting goods,” Shane said, his voice cautiously optimistic. “Places like that, they usually sell it out of a locked display case.”
Larry smiled wanly. “Maybe we’ll find a sales clerk to unlock it for us.”
Shane shrugged and looked downriver, at a tangle of driftwood piled up on the rocky shallows of the north bank. He noticed, with discomfort, a pale clutch of human limbs there as well. Bodies blanched and undressed by the strong currents. Another floated past under the concrete span of the bridge, turning and struggling in the water like a spider being washed down the sinkhole.
“I would imagine,” Larry continued, his voice softening as he watched the man float away, “that ammunition and alcohol were two of the first things to disappear from a place like Fred Meyer. Still…” he offered Shane a more hopeful smile, “that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about the beer I’ll have once we get there; and how’s this for pathetic: it’s even a cold one.” He bit off a hunk of beef jerky, chewing thoughtfully. “Right about now, it’s the only thing I’ve got to look forward to.”
“There’s always home,” Shane suggested, the words out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying.
The last vestiges of Larry’s smile faded. He studied Shane before turning back to the river.
“I’m sorry,” Shane said in a fragile whisper, his eyes gazing down at his hands, which seemed restless, agitated.
Larry nodded. “Believe it or not,” he confessed, “there have been times today when I’ve forgotten about them myself.”
Shane looked at Larry, at the bodies in the river, then back to his hands again, comfortable with their silent neutrality. “Me too,” he admitted, frowning. “Sometimes I forget about Mom and Dad.”
Larry sighed. “Selfish of us, isn’t it? But I suppose that’s what makes us human.”
Shane said nothing, his hands pecking at some long grass between his shoes.
“It’s been an interesting day,” Larry remarked, looking at the sky and the position of the sun above the bluff behind them. Already the afternoon was lengthening, pulling shadows toward the east. “Offhand, I’d say we’re not going to make it home before it’s over, and I don’t care much for the prospect of traveling at night.” He glanced at Shane. “Got any ideas where we might hole up until morning?”
Shane shook his head. “I hadn’t thought about it.” A silence passed between them. “The manager’s office, maybe?”
Larry nodded. “It’s worth a look, though the manager might be using it himself.”
“We could try to make it home,” Shane suggested, “then look for an empty house if we don’t make it. Or lock ourselves inside a car.
Larry agreed that they could, though the idea of sleeping inside a car — protected by nothing but glass — did not appeal to him. “I guess it’ll depend on what we find down the road,” he said, rising to his feet, his ration of food consumed. “Or what we don’t find.”
Shane threw his small harvest of grass to the wind and rose also, anxious to cover the last few miles.
The two of them stood gazing downriver.
“I’ll tell you one thing though,” Larry said, frowning, his eyes following another body as it drifted past. “I’m through drinking out of faucets and taps as of right now.”
Autumn Creek Road took them without trouble or complaint to within a stone’s throw of their destination. Here, the river swayed back toward the highway and some enterprising young developer had come up with the brilliant idea of laying out a trailer park with the somewhat grandiose name of “Riverview Court”. It wasn’t especially large — no more than 25 or 30 units, dropped down like jackstraws, without regard for aesthetics or privacy, on a wedge of land not much bigger than Quail Street — but it was active. Like a hill of ants after their mound has been doused with gasoline.
Studying it from the cover of an apple orchard in brilliant bloom, Larry and Shane heard a volley of gunshots and then a man stumbled out between the decorative pillars of the entrance; a man who’d suddenly found himself very much on fire. An infected mob came charging out of Riverview Court, knocking the flaming man down and tearing him to pieces.
“This might be a little tricky,” Larry decided. He and Shane turned away, huddling down in the grass to plan their strategy.
“We can get by them on the bike, no problem,” Larry said, “but how do we keep them from following us into the parking lot?”
Shane surveyed the curved stretch of road. There was a small vacant lot, deep and overgrown, between the orchard and the trailer park, but other than that, they had very little room to negotiate — the base of the hillside, eroded by past floods, cut sharply against the south shoulder of the road.
“There’s a wall all the way around the trailer park,” Shane noticed. “Maybe we could go around the backside while they’re busy here in front?”
Larry nodded. “Aside from crossing back over the highway, I think that’s our only option.” He followed the cinderblock wall with his eyes until it ended at a right angle. “I wonder what’s back there…”
“It used to be an orchard,” Shane reminded him. “Before they could start building they had to pull out all the trees. I remember driving by with my mom and dad and the orchard was suddenly gone, and there was this huge pile of dead limbs and stumps right in the middle.”
“That’s right,” Larry murmured. In fact, the whole area had been orchard just a few years ago, before they’d put in the Columbia Avenue exit; that was why there were so few people around. There were a few old warehouses, and some light industrial parks east of Columbia, but the trailer park and the commercial properties (including Fred Meyer) were all very recent additions.
Larry studied the small mob in front of the gate and decided they’d better make their move sooner instead of later. He glanced at Shane. “Maybe we should walk the bike through with the engine at a low idle, so we can keep the noise at a minimum, but still hop back on if we get into trouble?”
Shane thought about this and suggested another approach.
“We’re close enough now that we could just walk in, couldn’t we?”
The Yamaha was leaning against a tree a few rows back. Larry had cut the engine and coasted into the apple orchard when they’d seen all the activity around the trailer park. Now he glanced back at it, frowning. “You mean just leave the bike here?”
“Why not? It won’t do us much good between here and the parking lot, and it seems to me there’s a chain-link fence or something around the back anyway.” He shrugged. “Even if there isn’t, if we leave it here we won’t have to worry about anyone stealing it once we’re inside.”
Larry gazed across the vacant field, rubbing the color from his lips. It was plain from his expression that he didn’t want to part with the cycle, but in the end he allowed it might be more of a hindrance than a help to them. And it would be safer in the orchard; he hadn’t thought of that.
“All right, we’ll do it your way.” He pulled his revolver from its holster. “Got your guns ready?”
Shane smiled, showing him the 9mm and the shotgun, both fully loaded from their stop at the bridge.
Larry glanced at their makeshift saddlebags. “We’ll have to untie the backpacks.”
“Maybe we should leave one of them with the bike,” Shane suggested, “with some food and ammo… just in case?”
“All right,” Larry nodded wearily. He turned toward the distant beige wall, the top of Fred Meyer rising over the trailer park, at least 150 yards away. He sighed. “What if the place is overrun, like Summertides?”
“I don’t know,” Shane replied. “I guess we turn back and try to think of something else.”
Larry uttered a bitter chuckle. “There is nothing else. This is the last stop on our list.”
“There’s the medical offices further up Columbia,” Shane reminded him.
Larry shook his head. “Kid, I wish I had your optimism.”
“It’s not optimism,” Shane told him. “It’s desperation.”
“Fair enough,” Larry shrugged. “I wish I had your desperation.”
They broke cover well back from the pillared gate of the trailer park and the black strip of Autumn Park Road, crossing the vacant field hunched over like soldiers, their guns at the ready. No one seemed to notice them, and they made it to the cinderblocks surrounding Riverview Court without incident. Continuing on, they followed the back of the property line through tangles of weeds and overgrown grass: all that was left of the orchard which had once flourished there. Muffled sounds issued over the wall: a dull, almost mournful moaning, the senseless shuffle of sandpaper feet; and once, the chilling sound of a baby crying, lost somewhere inside the courtyard.
Shane and Larry glanced uneasily at one another and then moved on.
A breach became apparent in the wall, a break in the gray monotony blocked by a barred security gate. As they approached it a gut-twisting stench enveloped them, buzzing with flies.
Amid the tall weeds and sage, they found themselves wading through a litter of human remains, bodies chopped into pieces or set on fire. Things that were dead beyond question, dumped unceremoniously beyond the court’s perimeter for the scavengers to carry away.
The cloud of flies settled about them as Shane and Larry paused to peer through the steel bars of the gate.
The flanks of three separate trailers presented themselves, each set at a different angle, as if conspiring to block their view of the inner courtyard (or to hide the gate from those trapped inside), unremarkable except for a single bloody handprint slipping, weak-kneed, down a length of weatherproof siding.
As they stood gazing a shadow appeared, its shoulders stooped and its head drawn to an exaggerated point. It shambled up the side of the furthest trailer then hesitated, turning its head this way and that, moaning with a grim sort of longing, as if sensing them near.
Then with a gassy sigh it sank away, defeated.
Shane heard something whisper in the dry weeds behind him and turned, the shotgun barely in check, startling both Larry and the flies.
No one was there, not even a shadow, just an awful smell and pieces of flesh that had once been human.
They broke away from the gate without bothering to investigate any further.
A chain-link fence stood at the edge of the parking lot, filled with privacy slats which sliced their view of the store into narrow pinstripes. Gaps they had to move their heads from side to side to see through. What they saw was encouraging: the parking lot was all but empty. There were a few cars scattered about, their windshields smashed or parked at odd angles, but for the most part the superstore looked wonderfully approachable.
“What do you think?” Shane asked, his mind already made up.
“I think it’s better than we could have hoped for,” Larry decided, squinting through the links. “I see a few dead ones wandering around by the lawn and garden area, but it’s a long way from Summertides.”
Shane turned his head and several new figures came into view; half a dozen he’d somehow missed before. The slats in the fence had a tendency to play tricks like that, hiding and revealing like those magic motion baseball cards. Look at it one way and the batter’s in his stance; turn it another and watch him swing.
A woman in a torn blouse was pushing an empty shopping cart through a bed of marigolds; two or three teenaged boys were bumping clumsily against the door to home electronics; a balding man in a hunting vest was standing stock-still beside a teal SUV, staring into the window as if he’d just locked his keys inside, the remains of his left arm hanging from his vest like an empty sausage casing.
“Which way do you want to go?” Larry asked. “Home Electronics or Lawn and Garden? Home Electronics is a little further, but it looks clear to me.”
“I don’t think so,” Shane said doubtfully. “I just saw some kids by that big pillar.”
“Oh, yeah…” Larry nodded. “I see them now.”
“Which one’s closer to the pharmacy?” Shane asked.
Larry thought back to the two or three times he’d actually been inside and shrugged. “They’re both about the same, I guess; or rather, neither one. The pharmacy counter’s all the way in back.”
“Let’s take Lawn and Garden then,” Shane decided, picturing racks of hammers, shovels and axes just inside, which were bound to come in handier than CDs and digital cameras. He explained this rationale briefly to Larry.
“Good thinking,” Larry agreed, tucking his revolver back in its holster for the vault over the fence.
By the time he’d done this, Shane had dropped over the other side.
Ideally, they would cover the 60 or 70 yards to the entrance as quickly and as quietly as possible, without firing their guns or causing a lot of fuss that would attract unwanted attention. Unfortunately, the fact that the parking lot was nearly empty worked against them; there was no cover to screen their movement, which left them out in the middle of a flat black desert, with nothing but blind luck to watch over their progress.
The first twenty or so yards went beautifully, exactly according to plan…
Then Shane heard something that sounded stealthily like a car door opening — metal letting go of metal — and the next thing he knew a woman in a white blouse and denim shorts was charging their left flank, sobbing as her shoes slapped the asphalt.
Their guns swung up automatically, ready to cut her down before she got within twenty feet of them. To their great surprise, however, she stopped short and threw up her hands.
“Oh God, don’t shoot me!” she cried, her voice skipping like a stone across the parking lot, turning every head. “Please don’t shoot me! I’ve been trapped here for hours!”
Behind her, the door to the SUV was standing open, the one-armed man in the hunting vest no longer interested in its shaded interior. He was shambling after her, his gait slow and unbalanced, as if he hadn’t gotten used to the loss of his arm yet. The sounds coming out of his mouth spoke of a great need, of hours of patiently waiting for his quarry to be flushed out of hiding.
From all corners of the parking lot, his cry was taken up by others, all just as urgent, all just as needy. They began to draw in a tightening noose around the trio in the northwest corner.
The woman looked around in bleak desperation, terrified to find herself so exposed after hours of hunkering down in her minivan. She took a halting step toward the two men holding guns.
“For God’s sake, take me with you!” she pleaded, ready to turn back and lock herself in the SUV if they refused or maintained their silence. “Please, I’ll give you anything I’ve got, but don’t leave me!”
Shane nodded and she ran at them, sobbing with relief, her approach like a battering ram — a woman in her mid to late twenties, heavy in the hips and bust.
Possibly attractive, were her face not so distorted with fear.
“Get behind us!” Larry shouted, stepping out of her way before she knocked him down. “We’re going into the store! If you’re coming, stay close and keep your head down!”
“Thank-you!” she cried, choking on the ragged ends of her emotions, repeating the phrase over and over as if it were a kind of mantra to her, a delicate bubble of gratitude in which she somehow felt safe.
Shane felt her fingertips come to rest lightly on his back, as if she were assuring herself that the two of them were real, or else unwilling to let him stray out of arm’s reach. Her sobs were like a hot locomotive bearing down just behind him.
“All right, let’s go while we’ve still got some running room,” Larry growled, and the three of them ran toward the shaded entrance to Lawn and Garden. Two figures loomed in their path: a middle-aged woman who folded with a dull grunt beneath the butt of Shane’s shotgun and a man in a brown Fred Meyer apron with a savage shotgun wound festering in the hollow of his belly. He was more persistent than the woman and Larry put him down with the business end of his revolver.
The man fell amid the withering petals of his petunias and geraniums and troubled them no more. There were, however, others to take his place: long shadows staggering around the corners of the building, each one a walking horror. More than they had bullets enough to fix.
And the doors, of course, once they got there, stubbornly refused them entrance. Locked, or left without power; prying them apart would take valuable time, yet to outright smash their way inside would be an invitation for all to follow.
Larry swore and pounded the reinforced glass with his fist. He estimated they had ammunition to survive another four, maybe five minutes. “Look for something to pry these damn things apart!” he shouted, surprised at the heat, the raw desperation behind the command. He had thought that part of him dead, pruned away with his wife and sons, but it seemed that there was life in him yet, or simply an unwillingness to fall amid the stacks of manure and potting soil. It was no place for a man to die, to spend an uncertain eternity wandering about.
One of the teenagers from the north entrance came prowling around the corner, his gait light and unaffected, like the blonde boy Shane had tangled with on the other side of the river. He came running at them so fast that Larry wondered if he was infected at all. From what he could see, there wasn’t a mark on his body; just an odd lilt to the left side of his head, as if he’d fallen asleep with a head full of styling gel and his curly brown hair had flattened against the pillow.
The blonde woman from the SUV screamed when she saw him. A short, shrill blast that took flight across the parking lot, hit the cinderblocks surrounding the trailer park, and squawked back at them. Without a gun or a club, she picked up a good-sized clay pot and flung it at him. It was a lucky throw (or else she was experienced in tossing them), striking him squarely on the knee and knocking his leg out from under him as he stumbled to within 5 or 6 feet of them. While he was down, she snatched up another and brought it down on his head with the strength of both arms.
Larry winched at the dull crunch that accompanied the demise of the pot, which left the kid’s head looking as flat on top as a broken plate. The boy looked up at her — almost a reflex, Larry thought, raising his gun– but the woman picked up another pot.
“Will this work?” Shane wondered, the sound of clay shattering as Larry turned to regard the proffered head of a garden hoe. A brightly-painted blade on a varnished length of ash.
Larry assumed he meant as a weapon, nodded his head vaguely then remembered the door.
“Go ahead and try it,” he shouted, then fired his revolver at a black man who looked like he’d spent the past two weeks suffocating under a hot front porch. His skin was mottled and blue, the flesh beneath swollen too tight for him to wear. Like a balloon man, all the creases of a man approaching forty had been erased and distended, and when the bullet struck there was a sound like gas escaping from a torn bladder.
Shane set his shotgun across an open flat of seed packets and went to work on the crack between the doors, the sound bright and torturous, like a giant bird in its death throes.
The black man tried to crawl to his feet and received a clay crown for all his effort. He farted one last time beneath the impact and then lay still, as if the gas had been the only thing keeping him going. A nauseating stench, like mounds of dead chickens, drifted over them and Larry began to retch, only barely keeping the meal he’d eaten at the bridge down. He turned to see if Shane was making any progress on the doors.
“Why don’t you just break it?” the woman shrieked, a dark splash of blood soiling her blouse. She picked up the last pot on display as if to do just that.
“Don’t!” Larry shouted, holding out an arm like a policeman halting traffic. “If you break it they’ll come in after us!”
“They’re already in!” she contended, still brandishing the pot. “My husband smashed one of the doors in front and I saw some of them follow him in!”
At this, Shane ceased his exertions with the hoe and looked questioningly at Larry.
“Great,” Larry murmured, his shadow deflating against the wall. “That’s just great.” He looked at the woman as if she were somehow responsible. A turn of bad luck they had unwittingly taken in. “Which door did he break?”
She pointed at the dull flank of the building. “On the other side, by the deli.”
Larry chewed on his lip, as if reweighing their options. Aside from turning back, they boiled down to smashing the glass or making a run for the other side.
“What do you think?” he asked Shane, exhaling, as if it were a weight too heavy for him to bear.
“We’re already here,” Shane said gloomily. “If they’re in, they’re in. Let’s go ahead and break the glass.” He dropped the hoe with a resigned clatter and picked up his shotgun, swinging the barrel toward the door.
“Don’t,” Larry said, laying a hand on Shane’s shoulder. “Save your shells. Let Wifey here do it with her pot.”
“My name is Rachel,” the woman asserted, fixing Larry with a look that implied she could think of another use for the pot. “Rachel Walker.”
A hiccough of laughter bubbled out of Larry. “Pleased to meet you, Rachel. I’m Larry and this is Shane. Now, if the introductions are all settled to your satisfaction, will you please break the damn window? We’ve had a bit of a day.”
Rachel shook her head in dismissal and clipped past Larry, the pot swinging at the end of her arm like a bowling ball. With a warning to Shane to move back, she took aim at one of the lower panels: one they’d have to get down and crawl through. This, she reasoned, might discourage followers; most of the dead ones she’d observed weren’t smart enough to duck through a hole in a glass door. Some were, but by no means a majority.
Larry watched her wind up. He thought of cautioning her that the glass was stronger than it looked, then thought better of it, recalling the broken pots lying behind him.
She pitched the hardened clay and it impacted with a brittle explosion, a mutual annihilation, with both the pot and the panel lying in broken shards across the threshold.
Rachel dusted her palms on her shorts, glanced at Larry, then ducked inside the foyer without another word.
With a conceding grunt, Larry waved Shane inside, the lengthening shadows of the dead edging over the sidewalk now, moving slowly up the wall. Larry turned his revolver on the closest one — a woman whose pendulous breasts were hanging out of her blouse like two raw cuts of meat — and fired, laughing softly to himself as a piece of her skull skipped angrily across the parking lot.
Retreating, he pushed over the gardening displays that had been left outside, creating a weak barricade to cover his back as he turned and ducked inside the store.