Quail Street had changed while he was away.
It had taken Shane an extra day to get home, but now it seemed that the effort had been for nothing. The west side of the street (including his own home) lay in smoldering ruins, the timbers hissing and steaming in the light rain like old dragon bones.
He let the engine die and found himself unable to get off the motorcycle; unable or unwilling.
He thought he had prepared himself for this.
There was no way to prepare oneself for this. For the complete severance and destruction of one’s past; the thoughtless wiping away of everything that had kept him alive for the past two days. It broke something inside of him and, as the rain continued to fall, he found himself trembling, unable to stop.
“Oh Shane,” a voice whispered, straddling the seat behind him. “I’m so sorry.”
He let go of the bike and reached back, the street in blurs. He found a hand there to hold on to, to lend him strength and support.
He wondered how long before that, too, was stripped away.
Alone and short on ammunition, Shane had been forced to play things differently than he and Larry had the day before. When a problem arose — such as the black-clad gang camped alongside the bridge or the spreading kaleidoscope of Summertides — he was forced to wait it out or think of a different way around it, and these things naturally devoured time.
As the warmer, brighter colors began to leach out of the day, leaving shades of blue and gray behind, he turned his eyes to the passing homes and outbuildings, searching for a safe place to spend the night.
Eventually, he settled on one of the farmhouses along the way.
It was impossible to say what made it stand out from all the others he’d passed: that it was well back from the road or perhaps simply the lateness of the hour. Yet at the same time something about it seemed to call out to him in passing (as if it had been sitting there for years, waiting) and the next thing he knew he’d cut the engine, skidded off the pavement, and was pushing the bike up the narrow lick of driveway; veering not toward the house with its wide porch and inviting steps, but toward the brooding silhouette of the barn.
He was a little disappointed at what he found inside. There was no loft or comfortable piles of hay to take refuge in, but rather a sleeping tractor and a dull gray collection of heavy implements to drag behind it. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the gloomy interior, he saw faded bags of chemical fertilizer, a work bench littered with oily pieces of machinery, a pair of paint-spattered sawhorses, and an old fruit bin filled with tortured lengths of applewood… but nothing more inviting to rest his head upon than the cold, hard ground.
Arriving at this unhappy conclusion, Shane started to turn and heard the unmistakable double-click of a shotgun at his back.
That was how he met Marie Barrow.
Surveying Quail Street with a critical (almost detached) eye, Shane guessed the fire had started at the Cheng’s, the prevailing winds sweeping down the hill and spreading it south toward Kennedy. It had devoured everything on the west side of the cul-de-sac while ignoring everything on the east; all except a corner of Larry’s garage, which was withered and blackened but still very much intact.
“Which one was yours?” Marie asked, her hand still in Shane’s as they walked to the smudged remains of the funerary pyre, then came to an uneasy halt.
Shane pointed to a collapsed pile which had fallen gracelessly into its own foundation. He had no desire to get any closer; at least, not yet. Other things might become evident in the wreckage upon closer inspection. Things he wasn’t ready to see.
“I’m sure they made it out,” Marie gently suggested, plucking the image from his mind as if she wished to erase it. She turned slightly on her heel, taking in the houses behind her, the Iverson’s and the Navaro’s. She further suggested that they might have taken shelter in one of the remaining homes.
Shane shook his head. He had grasped at this possibility as well, but now it seemed hollow. “Where are they?” he asked, releasing her hand and spreading his arms. He turned a slow circle along the edge of the pyre. “They would have heard the motorcycle. They would have come out by now.”
She glanced around the cul-de-sac and sighed, agreeing with a reluctant nod, her damp brown hair shifting on the breeze, her cheeks still flushed from the ride.
“Unless…” Shane murmured, his eyes turning, lit with a bright glimmer of hope.
“Unless what?” Marie frowned, but Shane was already moving, running toward the door of the nearest house. The one with the singed garage.
Confused and alarmed, she ran after him.
Marie Barrow had been alone in her house for 15 days.
The first week had been spent waiting for her father to return from her aunt and uncle’s, a round trip of less than eight miles. At the end of that week, Wormwood had fallen out of the sky like God’s final judgment and Marie had come to the hard realization that her father wasn’t coming back. That something had happened to him along the way.
In the dark days since that realization, she began to wait for something else. She didn’t know exactly who or what that something might be, but her father had left his shotgun, along with plenty of ammunition, food, and water to fill the lonely days until she decided.
She had seen the motorcycle and its two riders pass along the road the previous day, without stopping or seeming to take notice of the house at all. She had watched it from her bedroom window until it was swallowed by a shaggy copse of willows, and then she had watched the willow branches sway until the beelike sound of the engine’s passage had faded to a distant drone.
Good, she thought, letting the curtain fall back into place, the room resuming its former cast, which was a dusky shade of brown, like an antique photograph. There would have been no room on the motorbike for an extra rider, and the simple fact that they outnumbered her two-to-one was reason enough to fear them.
But then the following day the bike came back. It was the same one, she was sure of it, only now one of the riders was gone. Disappeared just like her father.
The engine sputtered in the pale blue twilight and a dark lump of fear clotted in her chest as she watched the rider dismount and push the bike toward her along the long gray line of the driveway.
Marie left the window long enough to get her father’s shotgun. She broke it open and checked the breach, making certain both barrels were loaded.
She hesitated, wondering if the stranger would have a gun of his own, then decided it didn’t matter.
One way or another, her long wait would be over.
Shane rapped on the door of Larry Hanna’s former house and, when no one answered, tried the door handle. It was locked, of course, but this in no way discouraged him; on the contrary, he took it as a hopeful sign, a minor obstacle.
By this time Marie was standing beside him. Her eyes grew wide as he stepped back and put his shoulder to the door, hitting it once… twice… three times before pausing to reconsider his options. The frame and the deadbolt felt like welded steel, like something he could go on butting until his shoulder turned black.
“Whose house is this?” Marie wondered, squinting up at the second story windows, the light spray of freckles on her nose wrinkling.
“The Hanna’s,” Shane answered, searching around the step for a tool he might use to get past the lock. “Larry’s,” he added, the word slipping out under his breath.
“The man who went with you to Fred Meyer?”
Shane nodded. He hit the door twice more and found himself no closer to breaking it down than he had on the first try. He thought about using his shotgun on the deadbolt and then thought better of it, his eyes settling on one of the plywood-covered windows.
“Why do you want inside?” Marie asked, quietly pointing out the fact that if anyone on Quail Street had survived, they surely would have heard him battering on the door.
“Not if they’re inside the bomb shelter,” he said, moving along the front of the house. He was too busy testing the grip of the nails on the first sheet of plywood to notice her expression.
“Bomb shelter?”
“Yeah,” Shane nodded, grimacing as the plywood began to creak. Encouraged, he glanced over at her.
“C’mere and give me a hand with this.”
Even in the gloomy light of the barn she could see his guns, though they didn’t frighten her. It was reasonable to travel with guns these days. Sensible. So instead of the guns she studied his face. He was younger than she’d first imagined; younger, perhaps, than herself. She had frightened him, and that was reasonable too, considering where he was standing, but now that he’d turned he was regaining his composure.
Marie watched his eyes and found that they gazed steadily back at her. They did not pretend to meet her own or slide from side to side, plotting and planning. Likewise, his feet remained at a satisfied distance.
“What do you want?” she asked, the shotgun pointed at his chest.
“Nothing,” he told her. “Only a place to rest… to get off the road for the night.”
She sensed that he was telling the truth, a truth not only in his words, but in his eyes.
“Is it dangerous at night?” she asked, feeling the urge to glance back at the darkness settling over the fields behind her. Feeling it like a maddening itch between her shoulderblades.
“It’s dangerous all the time.”
She nodded, as if she suspected this also was true, and they studied one another for a long moment.
“I don’t mean you any harm,” he said, his eyes dropping briefly to indicate the shotgun. “I thought the house was empty.”
“Did you?” Marie sensed this was not entirely the truth, but neither was it a lie. Perhaps it was something he didn’t entirely understand himself. She lowered the barrel an inch or two. “What’s your name?”
“Shane,” he answered.
“Shane,” she repeated, her voice stepping back, turning inward. The name conjured up images of old television westerns and leather-skinned gunfighters. The hot, flat glare of the sun and a dusty place where death was never far away. Marie decided that he had gunfighter’s eyes: a dark shade of gray now, but in the sunlight they would turn to an overcast and guarded blue. She felt herself drawn to him and decided to trust that feeling. She lowered the muzzle of the shotgun to the hard and oily ground.
“The house isn’t empty,” she told him, “but it’s too big for just one person.” She tried on a hesitant smile. “I’ve felt like a ghost rattling around inside.” The smile faded until only her hesitancy remained. “If what you say is true… if you really don’t mean any harm, then you might as well come inside for the night.”
Shane nodded, grateful, and followed her in.
He missed the door on the first pass, not knowing where the shelter was; hearing about it secondhand from his parents and Rudy Cheng, and then only briefly, as if it were a grave or sepulcher they’d rather not think about. Shane himself had been imagining something in the basement, like a submarine hatch: something leading deeper into the earth. After several minutes of fruitless searching, he came back to the bend in the stairs and the door seemed to pop out at him. At first he thought it was a storage nook — a cramped, cobwebby space filled with old clothes and Christmas decorations — but on second glance, the door looked much too wide for that. Much too solid.
He glanced questioningly at Marie. “Is this it?”
She shrugged, telling him she’d never seen a bomb shelter before.
Tentatively, Shane touched the handle. The door felt suddenly very thick, as if it might open on a bank vault. When he tried to open it, the heavy steel handle didn’t budge. It felt welded into place.
“I think this is it,” he murmured, taking his hand away and looking at his palm in the faint fall of daylight that trickled down the stairs. The burnished steel had felt cold, and now he wondered if the space behind it had become a tomb. He’d overheard Larry ask Mr. Cheng to take care of his family, but walking through the quiet ruins of the cul-de-sac, that didn’t mean much anymore. Nor would he get beyond this bend in the stairs if there was no one left alive to unlock the door and let him in.
“Try knocking,” Marie suggested, suppressing a shiver. There was a coldness creeping up the stairs from the basement.
Shane raised a fist and knocked. The sound hardly seemed to scratch the surface; it was like rapping his knuckles against a large shelf of bedrock, painful and utterly senseless.
“This isn’t going to work,” he muttered, frowning. “We need something solid, like a hammer or a good-sized wrench.”
“There’s a hammer upstairs,” Marie informed him. “It’s lying on the table with a bunch of loose nails.”
“That’ll work,” Shane nodded. “Would you go get it?”
With a flip of her hair, she disappeared up the stairs.
“What about your mother?” Shane asked.
“She’s dead,” Marie replied, sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up to her chin while Shane sat cross-legged on the floor, his back against the wall. “She died of cancer when I was eight. Dad and I have been living here alone ever since.” She turned wistfully toward the window, which was hung with a sheet of black tarpaulin so the candlelight stayed within the room. “Now I suppose he’s gone, too.”
Shane didn’t offer an opinion on that one way or the other; it was hard to say what happened to people once they started wandering away from home. He wolfed a spoonful of Nalley’s chili straight out of the can, savoring it like ambrosia; it seemed perfectly suited to fill the nagging hole inside him. In days past, he’d imagined that cold chili must taste something like dog food; they looked and smelled almost the same. That part of him seemed very distant now.
“You know… just lately, before you showed up, I’d gotten to the point where I’d almost begun to envy dead people.”
Shane paused in his eating and looked up at her, surprised.
“Oh not the ones who are still walking around,” she clarified, “but those who have already lived full lives and died before this ever happened. They’re the lucky ones, even my mom. I mean, she was only thirty, but she never had to worry about anything called Wormwood.”
Shane considered her strange thread of logic as he took another bite from the open can, working it down slowly, thoughtfully. “I’m sure she had her own worries, just like everyone else.”
“Maybe,” Marie allowed, “but they’re over now.”
Shane couldn’t help laughing. “That’s a very backward way of looking at life.”
“I suppose so, but it almost seems like…” — Marie sighed — “I don’t know, money in the bank to me. There’s something very comforting about it.”
“Like an iron-clad guarantee?” Shane suggested, still smiling.
Marie’s whole face lit up. “Yes! That exactly right! A guarantee!”
“That would be nice,” Shane nodded.
They fell into a comfortable silence as he finished his chili, Marie watching him eat with a satisfied air, as if she had cooked and canned the meal herself. She played with the white flannel hem of her nightgown in an absentminded way, wondering when he would notice her legs. In the short time she had known him Marie decided that she wanted to be with Shane, if he would have her. Feeding him was one thing, but she had something else in mind that was more persuasive, more certain.
Still, she didn’t want him thinking that she was a whore, available to any man who happened by. It had to seem like his idea, or something that happened between them.
“Shane?”
He looked up at her, his thoughts interrupted, scattered like dead leaves. He looked relieved, and then his eyes dipped down to a bare length of thigh. Smooth, firm and white. She tucked her nightgown under her leg as if brushing back a fallen lock of hair, then shook her head.
“Nothing.” She seemed embarrassed and her eyes dropped to the folds of the bed. “Never mind.”
“What?” he prodded, looking at her in the candlelight. Her hair was loose, casting soft shadows over her face. The glimpse of her bare leg was still with him.
She shook her head again, rearranging the golden threads in her hair. “Nothing,” she insisted, hesitating. “You’ll think it’s silly.”
“No, I won’t,” he assured her, the vision in his head catching fire now. He reached out for her hand.
She looked at him.
“Will you hold me? Just for a little while?”
He got to his knees and crawled to the bed, folding her inside his arms.
Shane stopped swinging the hammer; he tilted his head to listen. There came a heavy click inside the wall: the sound of the Earth itself unlocking some long-buried secret. In that instant a dreadful certainty stole over him — that the shelter ought to remain sealed, that it contained nothing but sorrows — but as the thick door swung open he realized such thoughts and considerations had arrived a moment too late.
A hand appeared, struggling with the weight of the door, and then Shane found himself gazing back at a haggard and distraught-looking Rudy Cheng. Rudy’s eyes seemed to take a terribly long time to focus, and then recognition dawned.
“Shane,” he whispered, his voice stripped and splintered. “My God… is it really you?”
Light from a battery-powered lantern cast a harsh white glow over the walls behind him; bright enough to see that Rudy was alone in the shelter. The words FORGIVE ME were scratched into the facing wall in what looked like dried blood. Shane saw that Rudy’s hair had gone gray in parts, as if patches of him were already dying. The room itself stank of waste and desperation, strong enough for Shane to realize that he couldn’t go inside; that it was no longer a shelter; a cell, a madhouse, perhaps… a 10 by 10 foot crypt, but not a place for the living or the sane. Rudy Cheng was walking proof of that.
“Mr. Cheng, Rudy…” Shane intoned, gazing into the man’s haunted eyes. “My parents… where are they?”
A slight tremor shook Rudy’s jaw. “They’re dead, Shane. I, I’m sorry.”
All the breath seemed to leave Shane’s body. His mouth moved, he tried to form words… but there was something enormous in the way. He thought he’d prepared himself for this as well.
“They died the same day that you and Larry left,” Rudy went on, his eyes wandering around the shelter as he filled in the horrible details. “I spoke to your mother later that afternoon and she told me that your father had taken a bad turn, that the infection was spreading through him like a poison, and she feared that he wouldn’t make it through the night. She seemed resigned to this as a certainty, though I suggested there might still be some time. That you and Larry might still find the means to save him, but she shook her head. ‘The disease is too strong,’ she said, her eyes dark and exhausted. ‘Even if the medicine had been here all along, it wouldn’t have stopped it. It might have prolonged his suffering by a day or two, but it wouldn’t have saved him. It won’t save any of us.’”
Shane shook his head as if he couldn’t accept this. His trip couldn’t have been for nothing.
“She wanted me to give you something,” Rudy remembered, reaching into his back pocket, his trembling hand coming out with a folded envelope, the gummed flap still sealed. He gave it to Shane with an air of relief, as if a great responsibility had been taken from his shoulders. Shane unfolded it, finding his name in his mother’s handwriting looped across the creases. As Rudy finished what little there was left to tell, Shane tore it open.
“After she handed that to me, she went back inside to sit with your father. About an hour later, after dark, the two of them came outside… I saw them in the moonlight. They were… they were both infected.”
“Oh Shane,” Marie said, her voice heavy with sympathy as she reached out to touch him.
Tears spattered across the face of the note.
Dear, dear son, it began.
The two of them lay together on Marie’s narrow bed, the heat from their lovemaking cooling now, soaking into the creaking timbers of the house.
“Shane?” Marie whispered, wondering if he’d fallen asleep, his head heavy on her breast.
Sluggishly he stirred. “Hmm.”
The candle on the nightstand stuttered, the blackened wick hissing in a pool of wax.
“When you leave tomorrow, will you take me with you?”
He opened his eyes and lifted his head, surprised. “What about your dad?”
A pained expression passed over her face, like the shadow of a bird, one that she made an effort to shoo away, though it left a tear trailing down her cheek. “I think…” — she wiped the tear away — “I think that if he could have come back, he would have been here by now. I think…” — again she stumbled, clearly having trouble declaring him dead — “that if he couldn’t make it back, he would have wanted me to find someone like you.”
She broke down crying and Shane took her in his arms, letting the poison and the tremors pass through him and out toward the shadow-laden corners of the room, like ripples in a summer pond. And when she had quieted enough to hear him, Shane kissed her face and whispered in her ear that of course, of course she could come with him, if that was what she wanted. He had only been thinking of a way to ask.
She started to cry all over again, only this time her tears weren’t bitter.
They made love again before sleep came — insistent in its calling — and when she hesitantly told him that she wasn’t using birth control, Shane laughed softly in the flickering light.
“That’s all right,” he said, his hand on the warm curve of her thigh. “The way things are, the idea of birth control seems a little silly, doesn’t it? Like spitting in the face of God.”
Marie hugged him closer, more confident than ever in her decision
By the time the candle sputtered and drowned, they were asleep in each other’s arms.
“What about the fire?” Shane asked, and this seemed to cause Rudy more pain than having to tell him about his parents; a devastating pain that couldn’t be shrugged off with the delivery of a good-bye note.
“I set fire to my own house,” Rudy admitted and these words cut his insides like a tangle of thorns that he could neither pass nor digest.
“Why?” Shane asked, his voice quiet but insistent, causing Rudy’s face to crumple in on itself like a useless wad of paper. He made a choked sound and two long tears crept out of the creases beneath his glasses.
“Because I’m a coward!” Rudy cried, the thick green venom, the bitter self-hatred bubbling out of him freely now. “Because I was too weak to shoot my own family!”
Shane took an unconscious step back as if Rudy might explode, splattering everything in the stairwell with a powerful corrosive.
“Aimee and I were sleeping because I’d been up most of the night… and a man, a man came to the door in a Federal Express uniform. One of the kids… either John or Denise must have let him in because he, he… he killed them both before Aimee and I even knew he was in the house!”
Shane shook his head, a prophetic chill creeping slowly up the back of his neck. Filed neatly away in his memory, he saw a white Fed-Ex van overturned in a weedy ditch, the motorbike veering to give it a wide berth, he and Larry having just set out from Quail Street. The dead driver appeared around the next bend and Shane had put the grisly aberration squarely in his sights… but he hadn’t pulled the trigger. The man was easily bypassed and they hadn’t brought enough ammunition to shoot indiscriminately.
Now here was the result: a man’s entire family dead. Shane wanted to clap his hands over his ears, but Rudy kept right on sobbing.
“I, I shot him in the living room… then I took my son and daughter out to the street and shot them both like rabid dogs. I shot them in the head and, and after all that we couldn’t find Sarah. We couldn’t find my oldest girl.”
Rudy shook his head wistfully, as if he should have known better, and in that gesture Shane sensed that the worst of the tale was yet to come. He glanced at Marie and saw tears on her cheeks, her attitude both sympathetic and horrified, as if she couldn’t decide whether to reach out to Rudy or turn and run screaming up the stairs.
“I went looking outside for her, walking from house to house calling her name, deciding she’d run away and taken shelter somewhere else, somewhere nearby… but she hadn’t.” Rudy looked up in agitation, struggling with his composure, and now Marie did reach out and touch his arm. The gesture seemed to steady him, to lend him the strength he needed to get through the rest of it. “She’d seen it all,” he went on, tears flowing down his cheeks. “She saw what I’d done to her brother and sister and decided she didn’t want to live anymore. She, she went upstairs to her closet and pushed herself deep inside, back behind all her outgrown dresses. She’d taken… she taken my pocket knife from on top of the dresser and she cut her wrists with it. She cut her own wrists and then bled to death in the back of her closet.”
Rudy took a long, shuddering breath, as if resigned now to his fate. “When I came back to the house Aimee had found her, or Sarah had found her mother… in the end I suppose there’s no real difference. They were both dead, infected… but after John and Denise, I couldn’t bring myself to shoot them. I lured them into the garage instead and locked them inside.”
Rudy shook his head as if lost. “After that, I wandered around the house, listening to them scratch and moan at the door. I don’t know for how long… long enough for me to find the bloody footprints leading out of Sarah’s closet and the pocket knife lying inside, the blade folded neatly back inside its casing, which would have been just like her. I, I thought about using it on my own wrists, but that wouldn’t have solved anything… and I still had unfinished business waiting in the garage.” He looked at Shane and then Marie, his eyes imploring. “I couldn’t just leave them like that!”
“No,” Shane agreed, his voice a rough whisper.
“But I couldn’t bring myself to shoot them either, so I started thinking… and what finally occurred to me was the gas container we used to fill the tank of the motorcycle.”
Shane nodded, recalling the bright red can.
“I filled it up, siphoning gasoline out of the fuel tank of my car, and set fire to the house,” Rudy concluded. “I set fire to my wife and daughter and then I hid here like a coward, not caring if the house burned down around me or not.”
“What if they’re dead?” Marie asked, her voice treading softly in the early morning light. She looked at Shane openly, having just put her own father to rest. “Have you thought about the possibility?”
Shane nodded. “I’ve thought about it, but it hasn’t been that long. Only two days. It takes longer than two days to die of an infection.”
Marie let it go at that, but she wondered. Despite all he’d been through, Shane’s thinking on some subjects was still stuck in the past: a time when you could pick up the phone and summon an ambulance; a place where hospitals and emergency rooms still existed.
Here, now… bitten by something as aggressive as Wormwood, she suspected two days was plenty of time to find death.
They touched upon the subject once more before setting out on the motorcycle, Marie asking him if she should bother locking up the farmhouse.
“Go ahead,” he told her. “You never know. We might find ourselves right back here come sundown.”
She hesitated then asked him again. “What if they are dead, Shane? What then? Where would we go? Aside from coming back here, that is.”
He smiled at her, pleased by the plurality of the word “we”, and gave a slight nod. Larry and I talked about that a little,” he admitted. “Nothing specific, but it seemed sensible to start moving south, somewhere where the winters aren’t so cold.” He gazed contemplatively toward the south, as if imagining a quiet paradise beyond the stubbled ridges. White sands, palm trees, and the gentle lapping of the surf. “I’ve heard that the beaches are nice in Mexico,” he said, turning back, running his fingers over the padded seat, wondering how far the motorcycle would take them.
She clapped her hands and laughed. “Mexico!”
Shane looked at her and shrugged, embarrassed, then he grinned.
Marie leaned over the bike and as she kissed him, she pictured the two of them living in a thatched hut or bungalow, on a long and emerald stretch of sea.
They might never make it there, but it was enough.
Just the dream was enough.
“What’s it like out there?” Rudy asked, his eyes turning to the soft light falling down the stairs, though his feet were unwilling to step from the shelter.
Shane and Marie exchanged a guarded look, then Shane shook his head.
“As bad as we thought?” Rudy wondered.
Recalling Summertides, the scorched town of Brace, the exodus of empty cars on the freeway and the bodies floating on the river, Shane nodded. “Worse in places.”
Rudy sighed, retreated a step into the shelter then seemed to notice the conspicuous absence of the home’s owner. He studied Shane’s face for a long moment then asked about Larry.
Shane took a deep breath. “He made it as far as Fred Meyer, and then lost a good piece of his arm coming out of the pharmacy.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “I left him in the manager’s office with a loaded gun. He said he didn’t want to come back to this house.”
Rudy nodded. “I suspected as much when he brought me down here to show me his wife and son.” He raised an inquiring eyebrow then hesitated. “Was he of much help to you?”
“Yes.” Shane’s head was downcast. “I wouldn’t have made it without him.”
Something like a smile touched Rudy’s face. “I’m glad for him then. I’m glad he found a way out of his bitterness.” The smile slipped slowly away, as if he hadn’t the same high hopes for himself and, reminded of this fact, glanced uneasily toward the shelter’s far corner. The one Larry had pointed out to him. The thing was gone now, but he had no doubt it would be back, crouched atop the boxes, watching him… waiting patiently for the inevitable.
He turned back to Marie and Shane, the two of them so young he almost envied them.
Almost. It was a different world out there; one not likely to be kind to two such as they.
“You’re welcome to stay here,” he invited, “both of you. There’s food, water, ammunition… everything but a pleasant breeze and the stars overhead.” He stepped back and for one crazy moment, suspended by sheer force of will, he thought they might agree. That between the three of them, the dark eyes in the corner might sulk and fade away, but Shane shook his head.
“Claustrophobia,” he murmured, and from that moment Rudy knew he might count his remaining hours on the fingers of both hands.
They looked at one another across the threshold of the shelter: one unable to come out and the other unwilling to step in. They spoke a while longer, but once this fact became clear, it was really just a question of saying goodbye.
Rudy offered them all the supplies they could carry, pretending it was too much for one man.
And Shane took what was offered, pretending he didn’t know the reason why.
Afternoon falling, they left Quail Street and traveled back to the Barrow farmhouse, finding it shaded and undisturbed, traces of themselves still lingering about the silent rooms.
Come morning, the journey south would begin.