As soon as Larry was inside, Shane pushed a row of shopping carts over the broken panel; then, with Larry’s help, they blocked it in place with 50-pound bags of playground sand, which was stacked conveniently in the foyer. As they completed this, the overturned jumble of displays outside the doors parted with an iron shudder and a fleshy, insistent sort of pounding and exploration began against the glass. Smeary fingers touched and withdrew as dead eyes looked in at them longingly, as if they needed to walk and browse amongst the familiar aisles as much as they needed to pass on their disease.
Shane and Larry gazed back at them, taking in their slack (though not expressionless) faces. It was a brief opportunity to observe the enemy close up, in relative safety, without the notched sight of a gun barrel wavering in-between. What they found, however, was not enlightenment, but a grim sense of destiny, as if the one thing that separated them from the contagion outside was not a thin sheet of glass, but something much more tentative. A capricious whim of Fate.
Decaying hands and faces slid stubbornly against the glass, distorting their appearance even further.
One day, those faces insisted, your luck will fail.
Tomorrow, a week… or perhaps only a few moments from now.
You will fall, they whispered, and this will be the result.
A voice called out behind them. “Richard?”
Rachel was poised beside the checkout counter, on tiptoes staring into the vast and darkened cavern of the store, gazing into its depths as if it were a subterranean lake, filled with strange creatures that might be staring back at her.
She raised her voice. “Richard? Are you there?”
Beneath the beating of their own hearts, Shane and Larry could hear things moving about, lost within the sightless maze of aisles. Not a multitude, but enough that they could expect to meet a few unfriendly faces. The sound of Rachel’s voice seemed to stir them, to draw them from their quiet reveries.
Alarmed at the sight of a gaunt, acne-scarred face materializing out of the gloom, legs beneath it slowly shuffling, Larry unholstered his gun and asked her what she thought she was doing.
“My husband’s in here!” she hissed, wearing a pinched expression, as if she’d begun to resent him as much as he resented her.
“If he’s here, we’ll find him,” Larry assured her, then added (quite unnecessarily), “or he’ll find us.”
Shane, ignoring the both of them, set his shotgun on the checkout conveyor and faded toward an aisle filled with twilight and long wooden handles. He paused a moment, considering the inventory, then took down an axe — a sharp, grim-looking specimen that made Rachel’s mouth gape in disbelief.
“What are you doing with that? You’ve got guns, don’t you?”
Shane shook his head. “I’ll use the guns on my way back home; I’ll need the bullets then.” He hefted the axe. “In here, I’ll use this.”
“Oh my God!” she cried, her face blanching. “I can’t watch you chop up those… those things with that!”
“Do whatever you like,” Shane invited, quietly dismissing her. He turned to Larry. “How do I get to the pharmacy?”
“Now just a minute,” Larry protested, his face red, exasperated. He glanced at the dead man — within fifty feet of them now — uncertain whether or not to waste a bullet. “I’ll tell you where it is, but it’s stupid to split up now! We ought to stick together, that way we can watch each other’s back.”
“All right,” Shane nodded, conceding the point. “Let’s go then.”
“What about me?” Rachel objected, standing empty-handed by the cash register.
“Find something to protect yourself,” Larry advised, holstering his revolver and drifting toward a shelf stacked with steel fence posts, the sort generally used to string barbed-wire.
Glancing around the checkout counter, Rachel saw nothing but outdated magazines and minty packets of gum.
“Like what?” she wondered.
“Whatever you can handle,” Larry replied, sliding out one of the posts. It had a point like an oversized arrowhead: dull, flat and green, ready-made to drive into the ground. “Look over by Shane for a pry-bar or a good, solid hammer.”
Rachel shuddered. “I don’t think I can do that.”
“Why not? You didn’t have a problem with those clay pots.”
“That was different,” she said sullenly. “Those were blunt.”
“So’s a hammer.”
“Not blunt enough,” she said, shaking her head.
Larry shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He tested the weight of the post, hefting it in the palm of his hand, balancing it like a javelin. “Maybe you can find yourself a cast-iron frying pan in Housewares, or a marble rolling pin.”
The dead man was closing, tottering around a pyramidal paint display to within 10 or 12 yards of the registers. He began to moan eagerly, his arms outstretched, climbing through the stale air.
The steel post poised at his shoulder, Larry took a few running steps and hurled it through the man’s skull with a savage grunt. The sound it made as it passed through his eye socket and into the fevered meat of his brain was crisp, like an apple bite. A faint spray of blood fanned across the aisle and the paint display swallowed him whole, the fence post jutting out of the fallen mound like a victory spike or a flagpole. A miniature Iwo Jima.
“Can we go now?” Shane asked, his tone impatient and unimpressed.
The pharmacy counter was near the back of the store, sandwiched between Housewares and the magazine display. From where they stood (on the fringes of Lawn and Garden) they would have to travel through the forgotten lands of Hardware, Home Improvement, Sporting Goods, and finally Housewares before reaching the pharmacy.
“We can go about this a couple different ways, Larry said, extending a pointing finger toward the back of the store, toward a darkness that was more complete than in any other direction. “Straight back that way and along the back wall, or…” — he gestured to a wide aisle that traversed the entire width of the store like a wax-buffed interstate — “down that way, and then back.”
“What does it matter?” Rachel asked, a malletlike hammer in her hands, the head smothered nervously in her palm. “Just pick a direction and go.”
Larry looked at her, a fresh fence post propped against his shoulder. “Standing here, it doesn’t make a bit of difference,” he said, annoyed at being challenged by her at every step, “but if we get into trouble, it might be nice to have something useful near at hand. Something sharp or heavy.” He tipped his head toward the dark quarter. “If we go that way, we’re more likely to find items of that nature. If we go the other…” he shrugged. “Who knows? We may find nothing on the shelves but greeting cards and tampons.”
Rachel smiled sardonically and shook her head. “Greeting cards, yes, but I guarantee you’re not going to find any tampons in this store. Not this one or any other.”
Larry opened his mouth to say something, then promptly shut it, flustered and embarrassed, waving the point aside as inconsequential. “It doesn’t matter. If we go down the center aisle we’re more open to ambush; if we go across the back, we’ve at least got the wall to one side.” He hesitated. “Plus, I’m not exactly certain where to cut back to get to the pharmacy.”
Rachel sighed. “Well why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”
The small penlights they’d brought were not up to the task of illuminating the aisles, at least not in a manner with which they felt comfortable. The beams were weak and yellowy, dissolving into the general gloom and imparting a grainy, suffocating quality, like being trapped under an old woolen blanket. Dark shapes forever fluttered on the threshold of vision; inconstant ghosts that shied away with every step.
At the same time, the flares that Shane had picked up along the roadside weren’t ideal either. At the drop of the first one, it became obvious that they would be of limited use. On the move, the influence of their light was short-lived, and in the end they acted more like beacons than anything else. Better — Larry decided, once this became apparent — to use them as distractions, things for the dead to fight over amongst themselves.
So they used the penlights to make their way to the pharmacy, tripping over the occasional item that had been left in the aisles: cans of spray paint and WD-40, golf balls and wooden dowels; an avalanche of galvanized nails; items that had been picked up and discarded or simply knocked off the shelves by clumsy browsers. The nails had a knack of hiding from their flashlights then rolling silently underfoot, bringing short, sharp screams out of Rachel and dark expletives from Shane and Larry. Slow, dragging footsteps shadowed them, accompanied by despairing moans that seemed born out of the air itself, without source or direction.
They crept past an aisle stocked with plumbing and electrical supplies, then made a 90-degree turn around a customer service kiosk mounted with paint shakers, silent and useless in this dead, black corner.
A slack arm reached out of a gap in the back of the kiosk, its pale form uncovered suddenly by Shane’s penlight: bare to the elbow and flecked with spatters of paint or dried blood. It lay along the floor like a dead snake, the fingers splayed and partially eaten, nibbled slightly about the nails then left to rot.
They made a wide pass around it, as if suspecting it might not be completely dead. Shane shone his light into the gap and a wave of nausea rolled out like a black tongue, pebbled and swollen and as dry as a reptile. Two eyes gazed up from the pale edge of the beam: shriveled, sunken into screaming hollows, yet watchful all the same.
They left it to the darkness, to the blooming stench of its own decay.
Home Improvement gradually changed to Home Décor. Tables and chairs, lamps and throw pillows, photograph frames and silent clocks.
Shane swept his flashlight in a low arc and Rachel gasped, freezing in step behind him. Just before Larry bumped into her, he had an impression of Death staring back at him: a white face floating in the aisles. He focused his light on it and Rachel screamed against the knuckles of her free hand.
“Richard, oh my God!” she cried and the mallet dropped to the floor like a silly and useless toy. “Richard!”
She ran to her husband, clipping a straight-backed chair with her hip and knocking it over.
“No, don’t!” Larry shouted, his voice swallowed by the vast acreage of the store. “Rachel!”
Shane made a grab for her as she darted past, lost his grip on the penlight, and a black and gloomy curtain dropped suddenly in front of him. The light tumbled down his pantleg and he inadvertently kicked it down the aisle. It spun past Rachel and her husband and came to rest illuminating a damaged group of figures shuffling slowly up the aisle.
“We’ve got problems!” Shane shouted, taking the axe in both hands. He brushed past Rachel after the fallen flashlight, more afraid of being left in the dark at that moment than anything else. Despite everything he’d been through, the dead shapes seemed somehow unreal within the confines of the store; they seemed more like disgruntled mannequins than any serious threat.
Larry, however, knew better, and his voice as he shouted after Shane was red with alarm. The fence post he’d brought along was poised above his shoulder, but there was no clear target; nothing he could do but shout.
He took a tentative step toward Rachel as she pushed away from her husband’s embrace, a shrill scream spreading out of her like a shock wave, knocking everything back a beat. In the cone of Larry’s penlight, Richard Walker’s mouth had become crimson, almost clownlike. Then the red from his lips ran down his chin and the deadness in his eyes rolled over. It changed into the unmistakable face of Wormwood.
Rachel screamed and pressed her hand to her shoulder, trying to stop the blood even as it pulsed through the cracks between her fingers. She broke free of her husband’s grasp and took a blind step back, tripping over the chair she’d upended in her unthinking rush to meet him. The spot of Larry’s flashlight followed her down, shocked at the amount of blood already pouring down the front of her blouse; at the terrible wound gaping at the base of her neck; a raw, red mouth that screamed in blood instead of sound.
Richard Walker looked through the light at Larry, then down at his wife, ribbons of frank red blood slipping out of his mouth and pattering against the tops of his shoes.
Further down the aisle, around the glow of the fallen penlight, shadows began to merge and flicker. He heard Shane grunt; saw the swing of the axe, and something fell to the floor like a sodden dishrag. A man with a bald and gleaming head fell to his knees, his guts rolling out of him in silver coils. Shane swung the axe again and his bald head disappeared, swallowed by the darkness crouched further down the aisle.
Rachel struggled to sit up, to untangle her legs from the chair as her husband bent over her with all the grace of a man struck with a debilitating arthritis. She screamed, her voice bubbling, and Larry planted his post in the top of Walker’s head.
The dead man reeled back, looking absurdly like a human lightning rod. His feet shuffled a few last steps then the bright green post swept one of the shelves as he fell, taking down a collection of picture frames. Oak and metal and glass clacked over like dominos, burying him beneath a spill of airbrushed faces. Models so pleasing and pure they almost made you sad to replace them with your own imperfect snapshots and relations.
Larry heard Shane swear as something heavy fell and smashed to pieces, but for the moment his eyes were on Rachel, who was swimming in a puddle of her own blood, trying desperately to stay afloat. He knelt down as she opened her mouth and tried to speak. What came out of her lips was little more than a whisper, a dark understanding of the way things were.
She saw herself caught in the sympathetic reflection of his eyes. Pinned and dying there.
“Don’t…” she struggled, painting an angel’s wing on the polished tiles. “Don’t let it happen to me. I don’t,” — she coughed and Larry flinched, his face speckled with dots he quickly wiped away — “I don’t want to turn into one of those.” Her eyes seemed to strain toward her husband, toward the shapes falling in the center of the aisle. Her hand moved, grasping Larry’s forearm. “Promise me,” she implored, then her breath touched his cheek and she died before he could answer, her grip on him slowly relaxing.
Larry took his arm back and got to his feet, afraid her eyes would snap suddenly back open. He stepped over her with a hand on his revolver, ready to pull it from its holster at the slightest hint of movement. It had taken a minute or two for his own wife to cross over, down in the grim light of the bomb shelter, but he wasn’t certain that that held true for everyone. Some might take longer and some might take less, and at the moment he wasn’t in a mood for gambling. There were worse places to die than the Home Décor section of Fred Meyer, but there were surely better places as well.
Slipping on the fallen frames, the glass panes cracking beneath his weight, Larry grasped the post he’d left with Rachel’s husband and, bracing a foot against his skull, pulled it free with a sickened grunt. In the back of his mind, he recalled those British vampire pictures he and his older brother used to watch as kids: the ones that always started with some fool pulling a wooden stake out of a decrepit old coffin.
Walker, however, seemed content to stay where he was. There was no unearthly luminescence within the wound, no swirl of ashes eager to paste him back together, so Larry let him be and carried the post back over to Rachel.
She was just as he’d left her, her face slack, eyes gazing up at the place where he’d been kneeling. Without ceremony or sentiment, he put the point of the shaft against the smooth white curve of her forehead. Gripping it with both hands, he closed his eyes and dropped his weight down sharply, like a man falling through a trapdoor to Hell.
There was a moment of hesitation, a stubborn crack, and the post dropped a few final inches, enough to carry the point deep into the stirring tissue of her brain.
Larry exhaled, a sheen of sweat clinging to his pale brow. When he opened his eyes, Shane was standing over him, splattered with blood, the axe hanging loosely in one hand and the reclaimed penlight in the other. Larry thought he looked about forty years older.
“I tried to stop her,” Shane said, looking into her eyes.
Larry nodded, rising wearily to his feet. “I know you did. I did, too. There was nothing we could do about it.” He pointed his flashlight down the aisle, refusing to look at Rachel’s corpse, knowing that if he did she would haunt him forever. The beam picked up some lumps and scattered limbs; a butcher shop ravaged by dogs. “I’m sorry I wasn’t much help,” he said, bringing the light back to Shane.
The boy shrugged, and then sent a chill down Larry’s spine by admitting: “I might not have known it was you.”
A moan sounded somewhere toward the front of the store. It was answered by another, much closer.
“C’mon,” Larry sighed, swinging his light through the rafters. “Let’s get those drugs and find a place to rest. My back is killing me.”
Shane lit a road flare and the area around the pharmacy filled with an eerie pink light. The counter itself (and all the drugs it contained) lay behind a roll-down security gate; one that was locked with a long-gone key. Fortunately, they’d brought along a master.
“Stand back. Get behind me,” Larry directed, unholstering his revolver and pointing it at the lock. He waited until Shane was in position before firing his first round, which missed the lock entirely and drilled a path through a Viagra display.
“Shit,” Larry swore and took a step closer, the muzzle less than a yard from its target now. He tightened his face as if he expected the lock to turn to shrapnel and squeezed the trigger. There was a sound like an aluminum bat striking a brick wall and a corresponding wave which clattered up the gate. The lock itself looked stunned, its face brightly hammered, but it clung tenaciously to its hasp.
“Son of a bitch,” Larry exhaled, his voice dark and impatient. He put the gun a foot closer and the noise was repeated, more solidly this time. As the wave retreated, a line of solid space appeared at the bottom of the gate.
“Ha!” Larry brightened. “We’re in business!”
There was a shuffle behind them. A stack of discount books slipped off a display table and Shane turned to see something which had once carted groceries out to parked cars. A boy no older than himself, dressed in a white shirt and reflectorized vest. He had a Fred Meyer nametag that read “Corpse” in the shifting light of the flare. It looked like he’d been hit by a car, drug through the parking lot, run over one or twice, and then had found his way back inside the store. He looked pleased to find them, as if he’d been searching for quite some time.
“More trouble,” Shane said, the words lost as Larry rolled up the noisy gate.
The two of them ducked underneath and pulled the barricade quickly back down, the weighted edge narrowly missing Shane’s foot.
They found themselves pressed into a space roughly fifteen feet by two, the tall pharmacy counter pressed right against their backs.
Larry laughed softly through the metal latticework, stepping down on the bottom of the gate with his boot. The bagboy — whose name was actually “Court”, Shane saw — hissed like a reptile and extended his arms toward the gate, his fingers working themselves into the gaps, shaking the tightly interwoven links.
Larry made a motion with his head to indicate the space on the other side of the counter. “Why don’t you go ahead and get the things you need,” he suggested, his face still grinning (though Shane couldn’t imagine why). “I’ll stay here and entertain our new friend.”
Shane nodded and sidestepped to an open space of countertop beside the cash register. Jumping up, the heels of his palms planted and his feet kicking up the gate, he was able to get his seat high enough to roll back and tuck his legs over.
His boots touched down on a padded mat and he turned, the pills smiling back at him in neat, unmolested rows.
At first Shane thought he’d lost the shopping list; that he’d hooked it out of his pocket by the river or somewhere else along the way: a long list of drugs that all sounded alike, none of which he’d bothered to commit to memory.
He went through his pockets in an escalating panic, certain now it was gone and the whole trip was going to be for nothing; that he’d end up guessing and bring his father home a lifetime supply of estrogen supplements or stool softeners.
Slow down, he told himself, his heart beating frantically as he stood in the dark pocket at the back of the store. Look again, and this time start with the last place you remember it.
That would be his back pocket. He’d stuffed it in his front jeans pocket when his mom had given it to him because he was afraid it might somehow wiggle out of the back on the seat of the motorcycle. Then when they’d left the bike back in the orchard, he’d transferred the list to his back pocket because he didn’t want it getting in the way of his spare ammunition.
He reached into his right back pocket again and there it was, just where he’d left it.
My fingers must have slipped under it the first time, he decided, unfolding the scrap of paper with great care, as if it might take a mind to disappear again.
The spot of his penlight trembled slowly down the list and, squinting, Shane began to speak the names loud enough for Larry to hear.
“Van-co-my-cin,” Shane read laboriously, drawing the syllables out until they sounded more like a first-year reading primer than antibiotics. “Kef-lex. Te-quin. A-mox-i-cill-an.”
Larry lifted his head. “You okay back there?” It sounded like the kid was asleep and dreaming in Latin.
Shane murmured words to the affirmative, still in that same slow voice. He began to whisper the syllables again, this time drawing them closer, coming out with distinct words, some of which Larry recognized and some he didn’t.
Court seemed lulled by the sound, as if the words were a far-off melody he’d been rocked to sleep to during his childhood. His blood-scabbed fingers cascaded softly down the gate.
“Morphine, Lidocain, Novocain.” These said with greater certainty.
Larry watched the dead kid’s face: a devastated lump of adolescence a mere eighteen inches from his own. Beneath the damage, there was a tug of expression, a faint recognition… like a dog who hears a word it knows within a distant conversation.
Larry raised his penlight and the glow of Wormwood abated, though Court’s pupils remained the same, neither contracting nor dilating as he moved the light from side to side. There was a smell coming off him like discarded meat trays on a hot day or fruit rotting in the darkness beneath a kitchen sink. A sweet decay.
Court raised his arms again and banged them against the gate, as if prodded by his disease, then calmed again as Larry began to sing, picking up Shane’s whisper as he rummaged through the bottles, turning it into a song.
“Vancomycin, Vancomycin; somebody bring me some Vancomycin.
Vancomycin, Vancomycin; I’ve been searchin’ all the day.”
“What are you doing?” Shane asked, pausing in the middle of a shelf and turning toward the counter.
“Just singing a little song to Court,” Larry answered in a mellow tone, one that reminded Shane of Bob Ross, painter of happy little clouds on public TV.
“Vancomycin, Vancomycin; singin’ to Court ‘bout Vancomycin.
Hey nonny-nonny hey.”
“I wouldn’t quit your day job,” Shane said, turning back to the shelves.
A young woman in sandals and a yellow print dress came staggering out of the darkness of the magazine aisle, a hook of dried blood drawn from the corner of her mouth like a hasty comma, black and restless in the flare’s sputtering light. She didn’t come with a nametag pinned to her shapely breast, so Larry christened her “Julia” and began to sing the Beatles’ tune of the same name.
Julia, however, was not moved or placated by the off-key serenade. She let out a breathless screech and flung herself at the security gate, tearing at it with her pointed fingernails as if she would go on doing so until one or the other gave completely away. It reminded Larry of his dead son scratching at the basement door and the tune died on his lips, the mood gone.
Court, agitated by this new presence, began to hiss and pick at the gates as well, and before long Larry pictured them as two terriers, yapping and jumping at a chain link fence.
“How’s it going back there?” he hollered to Shane, a headache quickly developing.
“It’s coming,” Shane answered. He’d already found several items on the list, but not the one at the very top. The one his mother had spelled out in large capital letters.
“If you come across anything with Codeine in it, throw me out a bottle,” Larry joked, massaging his temples. To his surprise, a large white bottle sailed over the counter. It bounced off the gate and landed at his feet, half full of tablets.
Paveral. 30 mg.
“Toss that back when you’re done,” Shane said, raising his voice to be heard. “It’s on Mom’s list.”
Larry had to squat at the knees and reach down blindly to pick it up, which only seemed to upset the gallery. God knew why. He unscrewed the top and looked inside with the penlight, shaking his head and laughing softly to himself. There had to be 500 tablets left, enough to keep a man smiling and relatively pain-free for over a year, barring gangrene or wholesale amputation. He reached inside the wide mouth with his fingers and came back with roughly a dozen.
I could just take these, he thought, rolling the tablets loosely in his palm. I could swallow these down and take another handful and just drift off to sleep. Easy as pie. No more worries about food or safe water or ammunition. No more worries at all.
Except what you’re going to say to God.
“Oh, I’ll have plenty to say to Him,” he murmured, tipping the pills back inside the bottle; all except two. He looked at these after the lid was screwed back down and decided to tuck one in his pocket for later. Once they found a place to bed down for the night, the manager’s office or whatever. No sense turning himself into a zombie before his time. Ha-ha.
“Good one, Lar,” he grimaced, popping one of the tablets into his mouth and dry-swallowing.
“Heads up, Shane,” he called, lobbing the jar back to where it came from. Glad to be rid of it and the nagging temptation. Of course, he could always pull out his revolver and end it that way, but that would take some working up to; some serious reflection. Pills were something he was used to, something he took all the time. Aspirin, cold capsules, decongestant… what difference would his hand know, or his mouth?
“Ah-ha!” he heard Shane explain. “Found it! The last thing on the list except syringes.”
“Look up front for those,” Larry advised. “I usually see them while I’m waiting for a prescription. Insulin syringes. They come in pretty good-sized boxes.”
“Yep, here they are,” Shane replied, his voice closer to the counter now, right over Larry’s shoulder. “Shit.”
“What’s the matter?” Larry asked, raising his voice again. Shane’s emergence from the back shelves had excited Court and Julia.
“These boxes have like, a hundred… two hundred syringes in them. I don’t have enough room in my backpack for that many!”
“So don’t take the whole box. Take half, or a third; whatever you need. The needles should be capped. There’s no sense hauling back two hundred syringes if you’re only going to make a few injections.”
“Yeah,” Shane realized. “I’m gonna have to.” Larry heard him unzip his pack. “How’re you doing out there? It sounds awfully noisy.”
“Well, we’ve got two new friends at the moment,” Larry shouted. “I’d like to get out of this cage before we pick up any more. Two we can take care of; more than that and it starts to get dicey.”
“Almost done,” Shane assured him, his backpack zipping again, though reluctantly, as if he’d like to take more. A moment later his feet came sliding over the counter, the pack riding up against his neck as he slipped down beside Larry, as lumpy as a pillowcase stuffed with bricks.
“Looks like you just about cleaned them out,” Larry commented, eyeing the pack as Shane reached for his axe.
“Hardly,” Shane grunted. “This is just a skim off the top. You never know… someone else will probably need these drugs just as bad as we do, and I’d hate to have come all this way to find some asshole had cleaned out the shelves, taking more than he needed or could carry.”
“You’re a good kid, Shane,” Larry nodded, impressed. “No, seriously. We’ve lived next door to one another for years and I don’t think I ever realized that.” He offered a passing smile. “It makes me sorry we never got to know one another.”
“I’d say we made up for that today,” Shane said, his face bright pink in the light of the flare. “We’ve just about been joined at the hip.”
“Thank God for that,” Larry nodded, laughing. “I don’t know what I’d’ve done if I’d been cooped up in that house today.” A small shudder passed through him. “I don’t even like to think about it.”
“So don’t.” Shane clipped his penlight to his shirt collar, checked his pistol, then took a firm hold on his axe. “Think about how we’re going to get to the manager’s office.” He gazed at the darkness on the other side of the flare. “And where it might be.”
“That’s no mystery. It’s at the front of the store.” He nodded past Court and Julia. “Straight ahead, past the checkout lanes, then down a narrow hallway past the bathrooms.”
Shane cast him a sidelong glance. “It sounds like you’ve been there before.”
Larry shrugged. “I’ve never been inside… but a man’s got to occupy himself somehow while his wife’s in the powder room.”
“I guess so,” Shane nodded, his smile fading as he looked at the two obstacles they’d have to cut through to even get started. Court he’d seen, but the woman… He guessed she’d been pretty once, before Wormwood got a hold of her; maybe even beautiful.
The axe in his hands suddenly seemed much too heavy-handed, a brutal thing, almost obscene. He immediately recognized the danger of this way of thinking and pawned her off on Larry, who was unholstering his pistol. Court, on the other hand, could only benefit by the blade.
He tried to make the offer sound magnanimous, as if he were handing Larry a bargain. Larry, to his credit, accepted this arrangement without a word of protest.
“Ready?”
Shane took a deep breath and nodded.
“Mind where you’re swinging that axe,” Larry cautioned, reaching down with his free hand and getting a grip on the gate. He took his foot off the lip and rolled it up.
And to his horror and surprise, the barrel of his revolver caught in the blur of passing links and jumped out of his hand. It tumbled down his leg, off his boot, and clattered away into darkness.
“I dropped my gun!” Larry shrieked as Shane cut into Court’s left shoulder, dropping the dead boy to his knees. The heavy blade wedged into bone and refused to come out without a fight. Shane planted a foot against the bagboy’s chest and, twisting the handle, jerked it free, though the release sent him stumbling back against the pharmacy counter.
Julia, in the meantime, fell on Larry like a starving woman. He tried to push her away but she accepted his splayed fingers and outstretched arms welcomingly, like foreplay, or tender appetizers before the feast.
Larry screamed and the two of them fell in a thrashing tangle.
Shane stepped forward with the axe, raised it over his head, and brought it down with a grunt on Julia’s back, severing her backbone and spinal cord with an audible snap. Her legs immediately ceased their kicking and scrabbling, but the biting and clawing end of her was still at work as if everything was still good.
Shane raised the axe again, taking a step forward, figuring to aim between her shoulders this time. He felt something whispery touch his pantleg and, glancing down, saw Court’s palsied fingers feeling blindly for a crease or a seam to grab hold of.
Shane stepped hastily back and brought the axe down, without aim or forethought. It angled shallowly across Court’s skull, shearing off an ear before sinking into his jaw, dislocating it with a pop that traveled up the handle like a foul ball rolling off a hardwood bat.
Court’s head lolled back, looking worse than ever, his right cheek lumpy and elongated where the hinge had shattered. His eyes rolled up at Shane’s penlight as if asking God Himself for mercy.
Shane swung the axe again and the prayer was answered. Court’s head was split down the middle like a rotten coconut, his jaw clinging stubbornly to the stalk of his neck while his hair (and the top of his skull) tumbled away toward the magazine rack.
This distracted him from Larry for perhaps 10 whole seconds, yet in those precious seconds Julia had been hard at work. She’d fallen across Larry at an angle which best presented his upper left arm to her snapping mouth — the tough weave of bicep and tricep just above the elbow. As Shane turned back she cut through an artery and a violent red jet sprayed against the front of the pharmacy counter, which only seemed to excite her all the more.
She made a sound like a woman rubbing herself toward climax and Shane, guessing Larry would be dead within seconds, cut her off abruptly at the neck.
Rolling Julia’s body aside, Shane looked down at Larry and knew it was over. He was lying in an obscene amount of his own blood, the jet buried within the frayed meat of his arm now failing, getting weaker with every heartbeat.
Shane slipped off his backpack and unbuckled his belt, pulling it roughly through the loops. He crouched over Larry — who by now had lost all interest in screaming — and ran the wide strip of leather under the shredded remains of his arm, just beneath the shoulder. He threaded the tongue through the buckle and pulled it tight against Larry’s armpit.
The rough sound of his own breath whistled through his windpipe as his penlight shone down on Larry’s chest like a spotlight on an empty stage, waiting for an encore. Larry’s eyelids fluttered, fighting a desperate battle against unconsciousness.
A moan echoed distantly within the cavern of the store and Shane’s head whipped up, eyes searching darkness against the bright pink glare of the road flare.
Larry reached up with his good arm and clutched at Shane’s shirtfront, demanding his attention. “Am I dying?” he whispered, his eyes swimming, trying to focus. “I can’t feel anything.”
“I don’t know,” Shane answered hoarsely. “You’re probably in shock.” He tipped the end of the penlight toward the damaged portion of Larry’s arm and winced at what he found: a mass of raw flesh and a grimace of denuded bone. The bleeding, however, seemed to have stopped; but how much longer could he crouch here, holding it? A new hole would have to be notched in the belt to keep it tight, and then the arm itself would have to be removed or sewn shut. The punch in the belt Shane thought he might manage; the amputation and closing, however, were a bit beyond the dissections he’d done in Biology.
“Wait a minute…” Larry murmured, a tentative expression rippling across his face, washing away the terror. “I can feel something now… something warm.” With apparent difficulty, he turned his smiling head to look at the pressure Shane was applying and the fear rushed back. It crawled up his arm and spread across his face like wildfire. Beneath his screams, Shane struggled to keep a tight grip on the belt, to keep it from slipping off his shoulder and biting into the wound itself.
“My arm,” Larry grimaced, the fight draining out of him once again, leaving a pale countenance of shock and exhaustion. “My arm…” He shook his head, eyes squeezed tight. “What did that bitch do to my arm?”
“Larry? Listen to me.” Shane took hold of his neighbor’s jaw to keep his head from rolling, his grip becoming tighter, more insistent, until Larry stopped sobbing and looked him in the eye. “I need to punch a hole in the belt that’s wrapped around your arm and I need to do it now.” He glanced over his shoulder at the sound (still distant) of something crashing down into one of the aisles An avalanche of small cans or jars over in the grocery section. He turned back to Larry. “While I’m doing that I want you to keep pressure on your arm as best you can. Can you do that?”
Larry was gazing up at him as if he’d lapsed into another language, his breath coming and going in small, shallow sips.
“Larry?” Shane insisted, raising his voice to a harsh slap as he searched with his free hand for his pocket knife. “Do you hear me?”
Larry swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and nodded. “Yes, I… I can try,” he stuttered, his eyes wide, focusing on the belt as if it were a lifeline, a thin cord tethering him to the earth.
Awkwardly, maintaining pressure on the belt, Shane pried the leather punch out of his Swiss Army knife. Once he had it extended and locked into place, he took Larry’s free hand and guided it to the pressure point just below the armpit. “It’s going to bleed,” he warned. “Try to ignore it and keep pressing as hard as you can.” Shane took a deep breath, preparing himself, marking a spot high on the belt with his finger then scratching it with the tip of the blade. “I’ll try to be quick.”
Larry grit his teeth together and his eyes found Shane’s beyond the glare of the penlight. A sense of resolution or finality settled over him and he nodded. “Okay. I’m ready.”
Shane pulled the tongue back through the buckle, tucked the notched end under his knee and leaned his weight onto it. As fresh red blood began to slip through Larry’s fingers, Shane put the point of the punch on the mark he’d made and — neck straining, his face sewn with shadows — twisted his wrist back and forth, grunting with the effort it took to drive a hole through the seasoned leather.
Eventually, the blade worked its way through.
Shane exhaled and lassoed the belt around Larry’s arm again, his hands slick with blood as he cinched it tight and searched blindly with his fingertips for the new hole to fasten it.
By now Larry was screaming again, his face livid, shining with a sour, queasy sweat. Shane did his best to ignore it and concentrate on the task at hand, trying to be quick instead of gentle. Stopping the hemorrhage was the main thing; if Larry was still alive after that… well, they had enough drugs to take the pain away.
The tip of the buckle’s brass tongue caught in the new hole and Shane forced it through, hoping it would be tight enough and he wouldn’t have to repeat the procedure, adding another notch an inch or two higher.
Larry’s eyes rolled lazily into his head and his arm fell limply at the elbow, his fingers grazing Shane’s thigh in passing. At this point Shane realized he was kneeling on the man’s chest, the whole of his weight pressing down on Larry’s breastbone.
He rolled off thinking that he’d killed him.
Thinking he was suddenly very alone.
And in the wake of this, he realized that if Larry was dead, he wouldn’t be alone for long. His neighbor would soon be coming back, bearing the gift of Wormwood.
He tore the penlight from his shirt and pointed it at Larry’s face, staring intently at the spot of light until it became apparent that Larry had merely lost consciousness. There was still motion in his chest, a faint pulse throbbing at his neck.
Shane wiped the sweat from his brow, breathing a sigh of relief.
Not alone. Not quite yet.
He rolled on his elbow and looked down the aisle, past the stacks of bargain books and magazines. Things that had lost importance as the looting began. The road flare showed him the first 20 or 30 feet then made him imagine the rest.
The aisle would go to the front of the store, to where Larry claimed the manager’s office was located; one hundred yards distant; maybe more, maybe less.
Terra incognita, he thought to himself, the phrase plucked out of memory from a book he’d read, knowing now what it meant.
He turned back to Larry with a critical eye. The blood was no longer flowing from the wound in his arm, but he was still unconscious.
Perhaps it would be better that way, he reflected, imagining Larry trying to walk after losing two or three pints of blood, crashing from shelf to shelf, drawing an audible line for the disease to follow. With him unconscious, Shane could drag him along the polished tiles by his legs, which were whole and undamaged. He just had to make sure Larry’s injured arm was folded securely on his chest, where it wouldn’t be apt to bump or drag along and start him screaming again.
Shane looked at his backpack, still lying where he’d dropped it, and considered the wisdom of giving him a shot of morphine. He studied Larry and decided against it. The man was already unconscious, so the benefit would be negligible; besides, Larry was in a weakened condition and he didn’t want to risk an overdose. It wouldn’t do him much good if Larry OD’ed halfway up the aisle and suddenly switched sides on him.
No, Shane decided. That wouldn’t do much good at all. Larry would just have to wait until they got to the front office for his shot, and even then he’d have to measure it out for himself.
Shane would do all he could to help him live, but he wasn’t going to help him die.
And with that thought in mind, he picked up his pack and slung it over his shoulders.
The worst part of the plan was relinquishing his grip on the axe: leaving it balanced precariously on Larry’s chest and stomach while he took the man’s ankles in hand and dragged him down the aisle.
Halfway past the magazine racks, as the light from the flare was fading, he decided letting go of the axe wasn’t the worst thing after all; the worst thing was walking backwards into the dark, his hands full, and knowing full well that there were horrors skulking about, nightmares that might reach out for him without warning.
The penlight was clipped to his collar again, swinging back and forth with every step, spotlighting the passing floor, the shadowy “V” of Larry’s legs, the axe handle between them, and very little else. Occasionally, as when the head of the axe began to slide off Larry’s chest, Shane would pause to turn and shine the beam down the aisle behind him. This gave him about ten seconds of confidence, and then the fear and the uncertainty climbed upon his back again.
As the scenery changed from books and magazines to greeting cards, Larry began to stir; his eyelids fluttered and a slow groan issued from between his lips. Shane paused to strengthen his grip and continued back-shuffling down the aisle. At the far end of the greeting cards (Happy Mothers Day!) they passed a ravaged place on the shelves, nothing but colored bits of wax littering the aisle where the stock of candles had been plundered.
Larry came back to consciousness with a startled jerk and the axe slid from his chest in the middle of a wide intersection. Shane set his feet down quickly, gently, and pointed the light down the two new aisles. Nothing but school and stationary supplies to the west, but to the east, where personal grooming items gave way to detergents and paper plates, there was a sly suggestion of movement, an elusive shadow that might have been a trick of the eye or perhaps still something to worry about.
Whichever, Shane didn’t intend to stick around long enough to find out.
“What are you doing?” Larry asked thickly, his voice calling out from deep inside a terrible dream, one where he was bound and helpless, waiting for something to crawl out of the dark and devour him.
“Dragging you to the office,” Shane told him, picking up the axe and putting it back on his chest. “Can you hold onto that?” he wondered.
“Where’s my gun?” Larry wanted to know, the fingers of his left hand closing around the handle.
“You dropped it,” Shane reminded him, silently cursing himself. He hadn’t bothered to look for it. He’d been so focused on stopping Larry’s bleeding and then getting them to safety that he’d forgotten about the revolver.
He shone the light back down the aisle, over a wide red streak, wondering how far they’d come. The flare had sputtered out — either of its own accord or extinguished by Larry’s blood — and he was left with only the penlight to guess. Surely no more than 80 or 90 feet.
Larry closed his eyes and shook his head, denying this unfortunate fact. “You’ve got to go back and find it,” he told Shane, a fatal urgency in his voice, as if he’d had a glimpse of the future: a clear vision of one of them holding the revolver at some crucial juncture.
“I can’t leave you here and go back for it!” Shane protested, thinking of the slippery shadow he’d seen. Larry would be very easy pickings if left on his own.
“Leave me your pistol. I can defend myself,” Larry insisted, the effort of lifting his head, of speaking, leaving him short of breath. “Just don’t be gone for long.”
“You’re only half-conscious!” Shane argued, reluctant to hand over his own pistol. It left him with the axe, of course, but he was going to need the 9mm and every round in it to make his way home.
“I’ll be fine,” Larry said, reaching up for the gun. His eyes blinked blearily, as if he were having a hard time bringing Shane into focus. “I need that gun.”
Shane didn’t bother to ask him why he needed it (in fact, he had a pretty good idea); he could see that Larry had his mind made up on the matter and time spent arguing would simply be time wasted, so he unholstered the 9mm, thumbed off the safety, and chambered a round so it was ready to fire. Carefully handing Larry the gun, Shane picked up the axe and turned back toward the pharmacy.
“I’m not hunting all day,” he warned, pushing the words through clenched teeth as he lifted the penlight on his collar. “If I don’t find it right away, I’m coming back. Fuck your stupid gun.”
“You’ll find it,” Larry assured him, beads of sweat standing out on his brow. “Look around the magazines.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Shane sighed, skirting the paintbrush trail of Larry’s blood. “Just be careful with that gun. I don’t want you shooting me when I come back.”
“Let me know when you’re coming,” Larry whispered, setting the pistol aside long enough to dig the spare Paveral out of his pocket. It came out bloody, partially dissolved, but he supposed the blood was his own, so what did it matter?
He popped it in his mouth and nearly choked.
Strangely enough, the taste of blood made it easier to swallow.
Turning his back reluctantly on the two bodies they’d left in front of the pharmacy, Shane got down on his hands and knees and peered under the magazine display. As he’d feared, the rack had no fender or baseboard to keep things (like dropped subscription cards or loaded revolvers) from disappearing underneath.
He reached as far as he could into the narrow space, his arm wedged halfway between the elbow and shoulder, and felt around. His penlight was highlighting the final issue of Modern Bride magazine, the cover shining back in his face, brilliantly glossy, adorned with a young and fetching bride who was blissfully unaware of what was going to happen to the world before the glow of her honeymoon wore off. Shane wondered absently where she was now, at this moment: dead, or doing things like he was? Things impossible to imagine two short months ago.
Groping, his fingers combed through the dust bunnies and slipped cards to touch on small things — a coin, a screw, a mashed cigarette butt, wisps of cellophane — but nothing remotely like a fallen pistol.
“This is crazy,” he muttered, an uncomfortable feeling like a hairy tarantula crawling down his spine. He pulled his arm back and rested on his knees, glancing up and down the aisle.
“You okay down there?” he called and Larry rasped something to the affirmative, his voice too weak to do more than sigh. Shane looked at the axe lying at his side and a thought occurred to him. Holding the handle by its butt-end, he pushed the head deep under the display and raked it sideways, sweeping out a dusty arc of clutter. Moving methodically down the rack, the gun came spinning out on his third try, caught between the pages of an old Mad magazine.
What me, worry?
“Got it!” he exclaimed, picking up the revolver then nearly dropping it again as a loud series of gunshots came booming up the aisle.
He looked toward Larry and saw a slumped figure standing frozen in a muzzle flash, the flare of light imprinted on his eyes, fading quickly into another.
By the time he started to move it was all over.
Shane found Larry lying at the intersection, flat on his back and trembling from the sudden flood of adrenaline. Sprawled beside him was a man in a pink shirt with a gray hole flowering out of the top of his head, his right arm lying amid a clutter of Clairol boxes.
Shane swore, his penlight moving between the two of them.
All told, four shots had been fired. Where the other three had gone neither of them knew or cared to investigate, but Larry apologized for using so much ammunition.
“I just couldn’t help myself,” he wheezed, the pistol clutched to his chest, the barrel still smoking.
Shane crouched and exchanged the 9mm for the revolver, telling him not to worry about it, that it probably wouldn’t make any difference in the end. He avoided looking at Larry as he said this because by now they both knew this was a lie. Every bullet was important, and most especially the last one. The last bullet was the only sure way to keep from coming back; this was a truth. There had been no need to discuss it, it simply was.
Reloading his pistol, Shane ruminated on the possibilities this might give credence to in the new world, this concept of the final bullet. Would it come to be carried separately, religiously, like a rosary or St. Christopher’s medallion? A modern-day good luck charm to be touched and kissed against its eventual need? Prayed to and offered up when necessary?
This one certain inoculation against Wormwood.
Shane shook his head and glanced down the aisles, deciding they were pressing their luck.
“We’d better get moving,” he told Larry.
As they moved toward the front of the store, a faint blue light — twilight, Shane realized — began to filter into the aisles, giving them a better view of the shelves sliding past.
It looked like a storm had recently passed through, one as violent and capricious as a tornado; a sucking mass that left vacant gaps alongside shelves hardly touched: a run on aspirin and analgesics beside a full stock of cold remedies and cough drops; a need for bar soap but not deodorant; razors but not shaving crème. A vast and sobering void where the tampons and disposable diapers had been.
She was right, Shane thought, thinking of Rachel.
Orderly rows slid into chaos and vacancy before coming back to order again. Panic and Necessity shopping arm in arm for Doomsday.
Shane stopped at the first aid supplies long enough to see that bandages and gauze tape had both been hot ticket items, with nothing but bar codes and sale tags to show they’d ever been there. What he found instead were cotton balls and pantyhose. No rubbing alcohol or peroxide, but an untouched rainbow of dental rinse and mouthwash.
“What are you gonna do with these?” Larry wondered, clutching the items blearily to his chest as Shane dragged him toward the front of the store.
“Just hold on to them,” Shane answered, leaving him to wonder.
There was a woman’s silhouette propped up behind the checkout register near Aisle 7, one that neither Shane nor Larry noticed until they were almost within arm’s reach of her.
“Jesus!” Shane swore, dropping Larry’s legs with heart-thumping haste and fumbling for his gun. Amid the screams and curses, he pointed the muzzle breathlessly at her head and lifted his penlight. The silhouette turned into a plump redhead by the name of “Dawna”; one who, by reason of her brown apron and nametag, had once worked as a checker for the Fred Meyer Corporation.
Her short, matronly body seemed to be swaying ever-so-slightly, as if she had been waiting there at her post for days. She seemed not to notice Shane or the gun or even the spot of light on her face.
“What’s going on?” Larry demanded, invisible now on the floor.
“There’s a woman standing here,” Shane answered, though in a whisper, as if he was afraid he’d wake her.
“Shoot her!” Larry hissed. He had his gun out now, though the bulk of the check-out counter prevented him from getting a clear shot at her.
“I’m not sure if she’s dead!” Shane objected, the beam from his penlight playing over her. The counter itself blocked her from the waist down, but from what Shane could see she looked whole and undamaged. There was a line of dried blood running from the shadow of her ear to her collar, but it hardly looked fatal. And there was no point in wasting a bullet if he didn’t have to.
Cautiously, he tucked the light under his arm and reached for a magazine. Rolling it against his side, he used the end of it to prod the freckled flesh of her left arm.
Quick as a rattlesnake, she snatched it out of his hand, skimmed it over the dead iris of her scanner and let it fly over the end of the counter, its pages fluttering like the wings of an indignant bird. This completed (as if she’d been told by God to wait for them), Dawna toppled over into the darkness beneath her register.
Unnerved and surprised, Shane uttered a short, uncertain laugh, his heartbeat a dull thunder between his ears. He leaned over the counter on tiptoe and looked down at her, the penlight trembling.
Her eyes were wide, unblinking, gazing past him toward Heaven; her head strangely foreshortened, as if a yarmulke-sized divot had been taken out of the back. As he noticed this, a dark stain began to spread around her like a halo, dampening her hair and lapping at the pale stalk of her neck.
This was confirmation enough for Shane. He put down his heels and reholstered his gun.
“Must have been a reflex,” he murmured, dismissing her and shining his light at the inky gloom beyond the ATM and the lottery ticket dispenser, trying to plot out his next 30 or 40 steps. There was a faint, squarish suggestion of an opening, possibly a corridor leading back to the manager’s office or possibly his imagination drawing shapes against a smooth blank wall.
Whichever, nothing better suggested itself.
He clipped the penlight back to his collar and squatted beside Larry. His neighbor seemed to be drifting again, his gun resting on his chest, his face a pale mask left lying on the floor.
“Whassut,” he said thickly as Shane took the gun out of his hand and snugged it back in his holster.
“Almost there,” Shane assured him, quickly gathering up the things Larry had dropped and depositing them in a plastic grocery bag. He tied the bag to one of his belt loops and, as Larry’s eyes sank back toward unconsciousness, rearranged his neighbor’s arms to better negotiate the narrow checkout aisle.
Satisfied, he got to his feet and looked around. Through the high windows, the twilight had faded and true night was gazing in at them. To the right, past the last registers and the latté stand, things were bumping against the locked doors. Gray smudges pawing softly against the glass.
Shane turned away, hoping their numbers didn’t multiply during the night, and pointed his light at the dim wall beyond the ATM. Real or imaginary, the shape was still there, waiting for them.
He picked up Larry’s legs and began to drag him toward it.
A sign materialized.
RESTROOMS, it pointed, and Shane uttered a long sigh. He looked down the corridor and the polished steel of a drinking fountain winked back, as if pleased to see him. A second sign — smaller and more discouraging — indicated that the manager’s office was near.
Shane grinned. “Found it!” he whispered and Larry stirred slightly against the tiles, just enough to assure them both he wasn’t dead.
Shane pulled him past the drinking fountain and a wide gap appeared directly opposite, reserved for EMPLOYEES ONLY. Curious, Shane stopped long enough to look inside.
It had once been a break room or employee lounge, furnished with tables and darkened vending machines, now utterly silent. A man sat at one of the far tables, his head cradled in his arms, a large amount of congealed blood pooled on the floor around him, as if he had slit his wrists and then curled up to sleep. There were shotgun holes blasted in the walls and through one of the vending machines. Nearer to the door, a pair of legs and a slack white arm protruded from an overturned trash barrel.
Nothing much of interest, though the concentration of smells — the blood, the bodies, the food in the dispensers gone bad — was much worse than the rest of the store.
Shane let the light swing from his shirt and trudged onward, pulling Larry toward a T-shaped junction. A door marked MEN stood soberly against the painted plaster, its blonde wood dully gleaming; another chamber of horrors to be opened and stared down, though not just yet.
Shane halted at the junction and probed his options with the penlight. To the left he found the ladies room; to the right a set of double-doors also marked EMPLOYEES ONLY; and further on, like a mirage shimmering at the edge of a dream, one marked MANAGER.
It was locked, of course; the location of the key anyone’s guess.
Shane thought of the man in the break room and wondered if he might have them, the ring tangled in the sodden folds of his pocket. Briefly, he considered walking back and fishing for them, then a dark shudder passed through him. If that were the case, Shane thought, he could keep them; better to simply use the axe. True, it would ruin the lock, but there were likely heavy things within the office that could be persuaded to stand guard over them while they slept: a good-sized desk or a loaded set of file cabinets pushed up against the door as a barricade.
He looked at Larry and picked up the axe, holding it loosely, near the head.
Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.
Jack Nicholson’s voice, grinning beside him in the dark.
Shane took a step back, gripping the axe with both hands, though choking up on it, wanting only to knock off the steel doorknob, not destroy the integrity of the door itself. The knob floated just outside the cone of his light, like a planet: a silvery crescent drifting along the cusp of twilight. Shane positioned the butt-end of the blade a foot or two over it, dropping it down sharply when he felt confident of his mark. It glanced away, leaving a bright nick in the polished steel and a numb tingle in his bones.
He tried again, harder this time, and a scream sounded behind the door, startling him. Larry flinched in the darkness behind him, coming back to life with a jerk.
“Where are we?” he gasped, his face slick with perspiration, his eyes two feverish moons.
“Outside the manager’s office,” Shane answered. “The door’s locked and there’s someone inside.”
“Who?” Larry whispered, suddenly terrified of what they might let out.
“I don’t know, but it sounds like a woman; she’s still alive,” Shane added.
Larry seemed to breathe a little easier. “Be careful,” he hissed, his good hand reaching blindly for his gun.
Shane nodded and raised a hand, rapping his knuckles lightly on the door.
“Hello?”
There was no answer, but Shane thought he heard movement. A thin scrape in the dark.
He knocked again, more insistently this time.
“Hello?” he called, not wanting to shout but needing to convey their urgency. “Open the door, please. I’ve got an injured man out here.” He paused a heartbeat or two to listen. “We don’t mean you any harm.”
Good, he thought, shaking his head stupidly. Famous last words. We come in peace.
He knocked again, this time with the head of the axe. “Please,” he emphasized. “I’ve got an axe and I’ve got a gun. I can knock it down if I have to, but that won’t do either of us any good.”
Silence, unbroken by even a scrape this time.
Shane sighed and readjusted his grip on the axe. As he raised it to take another chop at the doorknob, a voice issued through the wood, little more than a faint whisper to his ear.
“What do you want?” it asked; tentative and frightened. A woman’s voice. “You’ve got the whole store. Just take what you want and leave.”
Shane glanced at Larry, lying quietly on the floor behind him, his head raised, listening. “We can’t leave until dawn,” Shane explained. “The store’s not secure.”
Silence, considering.
“Look,” Shane reasoned, a splinter of irritation in his voice now, “we just want a place to spend the night and patch ourselves up. It’s been…” — he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cool finish of the wood, suddenly weary — “It’s been a long day.”
There came a noise from the other side of the door. Muffled, like clothes rustling, or moth wings batting softly against the other side.
“How many of you are there?” the voice inquired.
“Two,” Shane told her, hoping that didn’t sound like much of a threat. “My neighbor Larry and myself. We came here to get some antibiotics.”
Again, an indecisive rustle. “What’s your name?”
“Shane,” he answered, wondering what difference it made. The chance that they might know one another was laughable. “Shane Dawley.”
“Do you really have a gun, Shane?” the voice asked. It sounded almost hopeful.
“Yes.”
“A gun with bullets?”
Shane frowned. “Yes.”
The next sound he heard was a metallic click, the lock disengaging.
Then the door creaked open.
The office was full of candles, at least a dozen of them blazing away, creating a glow that was almost blinding after bumping about the aisles with their penlights. Shane dragged Larry in by his ankles then the door clicked shut behind them. Larry’s eyes glanced mistrustfully about, as if the sound were the subtle springing of a trap.
“What’s the matter with him?” A girl moved out of the corner, her eyes on Larry. Something in her expression seemed to curdle, as if he were a dead dog Shane had drug into her parlor.
Shane’s eyes narrowed, looking her over before answering. She was young, plain, and perhaps only a few years older than he was; hardly dangerous by any stretch of the imagination, yet there was something about her that seemed unstable and bent. Like a chair or spindle-legged stool on the verge of collapse, wanting only the pressure of someone sitting down to snap.
“He was attacked by a woman outside the pharmacy.”
“One of the dead ones, you mean,” she corrected, her lips thin, frowning, as if he were trying to pull one over on her.
Shane nodded. He slipped off his backpack and untied the knot in the grocery bag around his belt loop. “Do you have any first aid supplies?” he asked, kneeling down beside Larry. When she failed to reply he glanced up, again getting the impression of something twisted and strained. Her eyes had been on his holster; now they switched to him. Shane repeated his question and she shrugged it off as if the idea had never occurred to her.
He sighed. “What’s your name?”
A vertical line appeared between her eyebrows. “Melinda.”
Shane nodded. “All right, Melinda. Do you have any clean water?”
“What for?” she wanted to know, glancing suspiciously between Shane and Larry.
“I want to rinse out his wound before I dress it,” he answered, his voice a mixture of annoyance and fatigue.
Her eyes narrowed critically, taking in Larry, the arm that hung limply beneath the cinched belt. “It won’t matter,” she pronounced. “He’s going to die anyway.”
“Look,” Shane objected, getting to his feet now to face her. “You’re not helping. He really doesn’t need to hear that kind of shit, all right? Now have you got water or not?”
She smiled, as if the two of them had joined her in a game; one that she’d been playing by herself up until now. “Maybe,” she replied, standing with her hand on the manager’s desk, her fingers drawing slow shapes in the dust. “I’ll tell you if you’ll promise me something in return?”
Shane stared at her, his lips pressed firmly together, as if he was afraid he’d say something he’d regret. He looked at her face, dull and unappealing, even in candlelight: old acne scars casting pitted shadows on her cheeks, hair hanging lifeless and lank, her eyes flickering back at him like those of a pig, though gleaming with a dumb sort of cunning. He imagined that she would want sex; that he would have to fuck her for a goddamn jug of water.
“All right,” he agreed, grinding his molars. “What do you want?”
Coyly, she hesitated, as if she didn’t know how to ask him, how to put her lust into words.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she finally said, looking hopefully into his eyes.
Oh God, Shane thought, reading her eyes and silently groaning. She wanted to go back with them; just as Rachel had; back to Quail Street! He shook his head, the very notion — on top of all they’d gone through just to get here — too much to even consider.
“We can’t take you with us,” he replied, his voice stiff and inflexible. “We got here by motorcycle. There’s only room on it for two.”
Unexpectedly, Melinda laughed in his face. It was a coarse, ugly bray; perhaps she realized this because she clapped a hand over it, stuffing it back in her mouth with fat, grubby fingers. When the better part of it had passed, she shook her head and told him he’d misunderstood.
“There’s nowhere you can go to get away from this!” She laughed again, this time sounding bitter. Bent, Shane thought again, like a voice laughing in a cottage buried deep within the woods. “I don’t want to come with you…” she said contemptuously, almost spitting the words now, her eyes shining deeply. “I want you to kill me! I want you to shoot me in the head so I don’t have to live anymore!”
Shane felt his mouth drop open, stunned by the earnestness of her laughter, which seemed to bubble out and embrace the notion of guns and bullets like frilly party favors. He closed his mouth and felt it fall open again, unable to think of a word to say.
“Will you promise me?” she implored. “No matter what, will you swear to God to put a bullet in my head?”
Shane took an unconscious step back, a stammering question — Why? — on his lips, but before he could voice it there came a hoarse and gurgling chuckle. He glanced down, but Larry’s eyes were on Melinda, as if his neighbor had a much better perspective from his position on the floor. As if he could look inside her mind and read her thoughts as if they were simple lines in a book.
“Don’t ask God for help,” he told her, his face creased with pain or bitterness, or both. “Don’t bother to swear by Him either, because God’s not here. He’s not listening.”
Larry studied Melinda’s face, recognized what he saw there, and nodded. “It’s a problem, isn’t it, finding a way to kill yourself so you don’t come back as Wormwood? I’ve been thinking about it myself; most of the day, in fact.” He reached his good arm toward his holster, as if assuring himself it was still there. “The disease lives in the brain, and destroying the brain is the only sure way of getting rid of it.” He looked at Shane and then back at Melinda, whose eyes were locked on the revolver, as if she’d been dreaming of just such a thing. “It’s easy if you have a gun… but you don’t have a gun, do you? That makes it hard to be certain.”
“I looked all over the store for one!” she cried, her hands turning to fists, useless lumps of flesh and bone. “I looked and I looked but they’re all gone! Even the BB pistols! They’ve all been stolen, along with the bullets! All by people like you!” She glared hatefully at them, as if they carried the keys to Heaven and didn’t even know it.
The anger in her seemed to pass through the room like a hot wind, one that whipped and stirred the candles and then died away, spent. Her head down, shoulders slumped, she opened one of the desk drawers and pulled out a knife. Its blade was long and sharp, made for chopping things in the kitchen. Her fingers flirted along its bright factory edge.
“I found this yesterday,” she told them, her voice sleepy, far away, as if the flashing steel had a hypnotic power over her. “I found it and brought it back here and put the point against my forehead, but I couldn’t make myself push it through.” This fact seemed to agitate her. “I thought about it and tried to make myself do it, but what if it didn’t work? The blade’s long, but it’s so thin… and what if I missed the right place? What if I shoved it in and it didn’t go where it was supposed to, or didn’t go deep enough?” She shook her head and frowned. “I’d be worse off than I was before. And it seemed,” — her lip trembled — “it seemed such a difficult thing to do… getting it through all that bone.” Another shake of the head, and then the words seemed to dry up inside her.
She set the knife down as if wary of it.
A long, uncomfortable silence fell over the room.
“Are you sure that’s what you really want?” Larry asked, his voice firm, unmistakable.
Melinda nodded, her dark hair hanging in a stringy veil. “I’ve been here for a long time. Weeks and weeks it seems… and the people who come here are either dead or worse… like desperate animals. They take what they want and then leave. They kill each other over things that don’t matter anymore. I saw a man kill his wife because she dropped a bottle of whisky. It was an accident… she was opening her backpack to put some chocolate bars inside and the bottle just slipped and smashed on the floor.” Her voice began to crack, as if the incident were still very vivid in her mind. “The man went crazy then. He had a big metal flashlight in his hand and he started screaming. He hit her over the head with it.” She shuddered, her eyes tightly shut against the horror of it. “The sound it made… and he kept hitting her with it, even after the light stopped working.”
She looked at Shane, then at Larry.
“I don’t want to live in a place where people do that to one another, where they die and come back wanting to eat their own children. At first I thought it might pass, that it would run its course and then things would go back to the way they’d been, but now… now everyone I know is dead and nothing’s ever going to be the way it used to be!” She started to cry and neither Shane nor Larry could summon any words to comfort her. After a full day out on the road, there wasn’t much they had seen to be optimistic about.
Her tears didn’t last long; apparently she’d almost cried herself out over such things. What was left was mostly hollow, an empty shell that wanted only to lie down in peace.
“Why don’t you tell Shane where the water is,” Larry suggested.
She looked up from her shoes to where he lay on the floor, a dim glimmer of hope in her eyes.
“I promise you,” he said softly, the revolver in his hand.
“You can’t mean it!” Shane objected, the outrage in his voice upsetting the candles, causing a corner of the office to flicker. “You can’t just shoot her like a rabid dog!”
Larry looked up at him. “Why not?”
“Why not?” Shane could hardly believe his ears. “Because she’s depressed! She’s not thinking right!”
“Maybe it’s the two of us who aren’t thinking right, coming all this way on a fool’s errand.”
Shane’s face hardened as if slapped. Slapped hard. “It’s not a fool’s errand,” he contended, his voice low and heated, like a banked bed of coals. He pointed at his backpack as if it offered irrefutable proof. “I came to get those for my father and I got them!”
“Yes, but how do you know he’s not already dead? Or what if Quail Street no longer exists?” If his earlier words were a cold slap, these were a pointed kick in the balls. “I’m going to tell you a thing or two, Shane, and I’m afraid you’re not going to like it much.”
Larry’s brow was dotted with sweat, as if speaking had become an effort for him.
“The first is that I never intended to go back. Now maybe that doesn’t come as a complete surprise to you, but that’s the way it is. I had intended to see you back home, but with my arm the way it is, that’s not going to happen anymore. I’d be a lump of deadweight on the back of that bike, unable to hold on much less defend myself, and I know for sure you’ve thought about that. You’re a smart kid, so let’s just leave it at that and not argue the point. I have no desire to die out there in that jungle; so if I get to choose, I’ll sit right here in this office and wait out my fate; and in the end, I’m keeping my gun to make sure I don’t come back.”
“You’re giving up?” Shane said, aghast. Contempt in his tone, though there were tears in his lashes. “You’re just going to sit here in this fucking room holding a gun to your head?”
Larry winced a little at the image. “I don’t think I’ll have to wait all that long, but yes, if that’s the way you want to see it, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Frankly speaking, I don’t think there are enough drugs in that backpack to cure me; your dad either, for that matter; but that’s only my opinion; frank and uninformed. If things were different… if my gun hadn’t caught in that gate and if my arm were whole and my wife and two sons were still alive, then there might still be some fight in me. But then given all that, there’s no reason to suppose I’d be sitting here, is there?”
Shane wiped his face and frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think I gave up on life when I lost my faith in God. If not then, it was surely the minute I put a bullet in my dead son’s brain. After that… Jan, Mark, this whole long day… I’ve been more or less a dead man walking, looking for a place where I could lie down and die. Last night by the fire, I agreed to come with you because I knew I’d find that place along the way.”
Larry looked around the room and nodded, as if satisfied. “It’s not exactly paradise, but it looks all right by candlelight.” His eyes found Shane again. “And more importantly, I get to choose it. Not something by the name of Wormwood.”
“But what about me?” Shane pleaded, his tears spilling openly now. “How am I going to get back home without you? I can’t drive the motorbike!”
Larry smiled. “Sure you can. There’s not much to it, and like I said, you’re a smart kid. You’ll figure it out, and it will go much faster without me. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but with some luck you’ll make it. And to that end, the best thing you can do for yourself is get a good night’s sleep.” He looked at Melinda. “I’d imagine there’s some food around here as well as water?”
Slowly, as if hypnotized by this drama, she nodded.
“I can’t imagine that she and I will have much use for it, so why don’t you go ahead and patch up my arm as best you can with those cotton balls and nylon stockings, dole me out a few more pills… and while you’re doing that Melinda can get the food and water. We’ll have a last meal together then she and I can sit up and watch over you while you sleep. Get to know one another.”
Larry grinned, tears streaming helplessly down his face.
“Who knows? Maybe after you’re gone, she and I will decide to run away together.”
When Shane awoke, half the candles had burned out and the rest were drowning, little more than blackened wicks floating in a last spoonful of paraffin. There were no windows or skylights within the office, but something inside him seemed to know that the sun would soon be rising.
He sat up and rubbed his face.
“Morning,” Larry said, looking worse for the night, red lines of infection spreading up and down his arm. Melinda was snoring softly against the floor, her respirations slow and labored.
“What time is it?” Shane asked, his mouth dry and thirsty.
“Time for you to think about leaving,” Larry answered.
Shane retrieved the shotgun from beneath the checkout counter and gazed at the silhouettes moving sluggishly against the faint blue dawn. He guessed that they’d picked up a few more since yesterday; three or four, maybe as many as half a dozen, but there was no indication they knew he was there. They were just milling about, wanting in.
Melinda moved beside him. “C’mon,” she whispered, “I’ll show you another way.”
He followed her through a dark maze of children’s and then women’s apparel to a fire exit next to the fitting rooms. He couldn’t see what was on the other side of it, but neither could they see in, so there was no reason to suppose any sort of crowd had gathered around it. It would not be remembered as an entrance, so in all likelihood that made it as good as a blank wall. Beyond would be a short skirt of walkway, and then the parking lot… as flat and as frightening as the end of the earth.
As far as his preparations went, it was the end. Beyond that, he imagined a motorcycle propped patiently against an apple tree, a house and a street he had once called home… but these things, he realized, might well be illusions, far and forever beyond his reach.
He checked his guns one last time and adjusted his backpack. There was an extra box of shotgun shells tucked in amongst the bottles and syringes, a dusty box that had fallen beneath the display case in Sporting Goods. Shane (thinking of the magazine rack) had gotten down on his hands and knees with the axe and out they’d come, like an unexpected bonus. A secret toy surprise. And as luck would have it, they fit the shotgun.
Now he looked at the dull metal face of the door.
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND.
“Good luck,” Melinda said, though without much enthusiasm. She looked like she wanted to get back to Larry. To the dark promise he was holding for her.
Shane hesitated. Though he and Larry had already said their goodbyes, it seemed wrong to just leave like this, knowing what would happen once she got back to the office.
“Tell Larry… tell him I’ll always remember him.”
It seemed so little, such a useless thing to say, yet Melinda seemed oddly touched by it, as if its real worth went beyond words. “I’ll tell him,” she promised, then did something even more unexpected: she kissed him on the check.
“Remember me too, even if it’s just a little.”
She smiled and for the first time she was beautiful.
He tucked the image away like a snapshot and carried it out the door with him.
Larry looked grim beneath the fading flicker of the last two candles, as if the disease had strengthened its hold on him since Shane had slipped away. He looked nervous, as if he wasn’t entirely sure he’d made the right decision.
He looked up at Melinda. “Did he get away all right?”
She nodded. “I watched him as long as I could. He made it out of the parking lot and over the fence.” A small, secret smile knit itself out of the shadows on her face. “He looked back while he was on the top of the fence and waved to me.”
Larry chuckled softly, closing his eyes to better see it. Slowly, as the image left him, his humor faded.
“Will you keep your promise to me?” Her voice was scared, uncertain, as if something fundamental had changed in him while she was away; the return of his faith, perhaps, or simply an unwillingness to part with his last few bullets.
“I’ll keep my promise,” he answered, trying to sit up a little straighter. “Are you ready?”
She nodded and moved across the room, getting down on her hands and knees beside him.
“What about a note?” he wondered, his palms damp, procrastinating now. “Isn’t there something you’d like to leave behind?”
She told him that Shane had taken it with him.
“All right,” he said wearily, lifting the revolver and cracking open the cylinder. There were no empty spaces inside; no room left for hope or second chances.
“Will you hold me?” she asked, her voice doubtful.
Larry nodded and she crawled up next to him, like a lover. “I almost forgot,” she said, looking into his eyes. “Shane told me to tell you something. He said that he wouldn’t forget you.”
Larry accepted this with a grateful nod, all that seemed left in him now.
Melinda reached up and kissed him as she had Shane, then took the barrel of the gun and put it between her eyes. A small and helpless shiver passed through her.
“Thank-you,” she whispered and Larry squeezed the trigger.
Her body jumped and then relaxed.
On the desk above, one of the last two candles hissed and then guttered out.
A deep and tomblike silence hung over Riverview Court as Shane chased his shadow westward along the back wall. The trailer park felt spent inside, played out, with nothing left to grace its days except the gentle progression of decay, the past slowly dissolving to cinderblock and bone.
The barred gate that he and Larry had stopped at was standing open now, though what that meant he wasn’t sure. Perhaps someone inside had survived the epidemic: a last soul who had waited out his chance and then slipped away like a thief.
Someone like himself.
He passed without stopping, pausing only as he reached the far corner. The orchard lay, cool and rustling, across a final gap. He peeked around the corner and saw a dead man, 40 or 50 yards away but wandering about in persistent circles, as if he’d lost something of vague importance in the dry grass and weeds.
Watching him, something in Shane seemed to lock up and a small voice inside his head urged him to turn back. Back to Larry and Melinda and the darkened cavern of the store. To simply end it, now, before another day’s atrocities began to heap themselves upon his shoulders. In that despairing moment the future seemed too dark, too heavy to bear.
The dead man turned, his bloody bathrobe billowing in the morning breeze.
And the next minute Shane was running. Not looking back or to either side… but to the cool and rustling trees.
For better or worse, it was as much of the future as he allowed himself to see.
Larry pushed Melinda’s body aside and felt along the edge of the desktop, reaching for the narrow drawer above the kneehole when he failed to find what he wanted, which was a pencil and paper.
Unlike Melinda, he felt a need to keep his dying thoughts close to him, spelled out as eloquently as he could manage before the last candle sputtered out, leaving him with nothing but darkness and a loaded revolver.
There was a pencil tray in the front of the drawer which yielded a well-chewed stub, but the paper to write upon was harder to come by. Deeper in the drawer, he supposed, or used as toilet tissue when the real thing became as extinct as the dodo. No matter, he thought, taking his arm back and reaching for his wallet. Surely it would contain a scrap — a business card or an old receipt — with enough blank space on the back to make his farewells to the world.
Instead, he found a heavy fold of paper tucked beneath the underside of his wallet. Curious, he tugged it free and held it up to the light.
To Whom It May Concern,
The salutation conjured an image of a city in smoking ruins, and a man gazing out over the destruction from the driver’s seat of his Impala.
Their first stop the previous day, at the overlook atop the ridge.
Larry had stuffed the note in his pocket to keep Shane from reading it, not bothering to read it himself. He unfolded the page and found himself face to face with God.
Lamentations, Chapter 3.
It was a quotation which Larry knew; one he had learned quite recently, in fact, due to its inclusion of the word “wormwood”; which had, of late, taken on some greater significance. In his studies he had found it a slippery word, one with uncertain or multiple meanings.
That, perhaps, had changed.
I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His wrath.
He has led me and made me walk in darkness and not in light.
Surely He has turned His hand against me time and time again throughout the day.
He has aged my flesh and my skin and broken my bones.
He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and woe.
He has set me down in dark places like the dead of long ago.
He has hedged me so I cannot get out; He has made my chain heavy.
Even when I cry and shout, He shuts out my prayer.
He has blocked my ways with hewn stone; He has made my paths crooked.
He has been to me a bear lying in wait, like a lion in ambush.
He has turned aside my ways and torn me in pieces; He has made me desolate.
He has bent His bow and set me up as a target for the arrow.
He has caused the arrows of His quiver to pierce my loins.
Larry closed his eyes and let the arm holding the page drop down to his side. His eyes were filled with tears and he spoke the last line of the note from memory, as if had been written especially for him.
“‘He has filled me with bitterness, He has made me drink wormwood.’”
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in darkness. The last candle had guttered out.
“No matter,” he said aloud, folding the note along its well-worn creases. He tucked half the fold inside his shirt pocket and left the other half out, like a badge. Something that God and the world could see.
Given a thousand years, he would never come up with anything better.