“Fun is fun,” Ed asserted, adjusting his John Deere cap, pulling it down so only the lower half of his face was visible, “so let’s have fun.” He gestured at Keith. “This one here’s been starin’ at me like he thinks I’m queer or something.” He coughed phlegmy laughter. “I’ll bet he wouldn’t mind gettin’ down on his knees and suckin’ my big old wad.” He started around the front of the Cherokee, arm stiff and the barrel of his gun pivoting on Keith. “Whadaya say, Soldier-boy? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Texas nodded encouragingly. “Have him do it right here at the pumps, Ed. Give the folks drivin’ by a nice show. Let ‘em know that strange days are here.” He tipped back his cap and laughed. “Strange days, indeed.”
“Good idea,” Ed agreed, his free hand crawling downward like a blind spider, feeling for his fly. “Be just like back in stir.” The grin on his face hardened, turned black as he glanced at Texas. “Keep an eye on that one,” he warned, jerking his head in Mike’s direction. “See that he stays put.”
Ed’s fingers worked and his jeans slumped down around his knees. He cocked the hammer of his giant six-gun. “All right now,” he said, grinning at Keith. “Down on your knees.”
“Suck your own dick,” Keith said, his voice strained.
The .45 lashed out, describing an angry arc through the fluorescents, its notched barrel striking Keith hard across the right temple. The blood that pattered to the concrete pad looked black under the stuttering lights. Keith wiped his face and looked hard at Ed.
Ed smiled, all his teeth coming out for the occasion. “This here gun has real bullets in it, Soldier. Sure as I’m standin’ here, they’ll open you up like a goddamn zipper. I seen it once tonight already,” he assured them, shifting his eyes to include Mike. “Now you’ll get on your knees and do what I say or you’ll suck on this gas pump instead and when you’re done I’ll light you on fire. At this point I don’t particularly care which; I get off either way.”
Slowly, Keith planted his palms on the scuffed concrete and knelt down, his gaze never leaving the gleeful sparkle floating beneath the bill of the man’s cap.
“That’s more like it,” Ed grinned. He hitched his thumb into the waistband of his shorts and his penis fell out, limp and unwashed, like something that had been fermenting in the soil. The shadow of the gun hovered over Keith, threatening, but not quite steady. “Nice and gently now,” Ed instructed. “Make me feel it.”
Texas giggled, delighted with the show. His gun wandered slowly out of line with Mike.
Rudy, whose view of the proceedings was obscured by the gas pumps, stood at the checkout counter with a dozen or so bulky items and began sorting through them. “Stay Free Maxi-Pads,” he said in a loud, clear voice, holding up the package like an obscure offering to the security camera. “Six boxes.”
The declaration cut right through the broken windows and bounced across the parking lot, startling the two newcomers. Ed jumped, his head swiveling sideways as Texas swore out loud.
What happened next happened very quickly.
Keith Sturling had played a little football in high school, mostly running back, but he’d hit the blocking sleds enough to know what to do at that moment. The trick, as the coach had explained, was to run through the obstacle in your path, to make a ramrod of your body and not let it bounce you back on your ass. And that’s exactly what Keith did: launched himself at the spindly legs and elongated penis in front of him and ploughed through them like a bull in a Halloween corn maze.
Ed made a startled and breathless sound, something between a hiccough and a grunt, and as he hit the concrete the gun fired into the wings of the kiosk above their heads. One of the florescent tubes exploded and a hail of broken glass tinkled down.
Mike launched himself at Texas as the sleek, chrome pistol swung round toward Keith. Keith had his hand in his pocket now, reaching for the 9mm Mike had given him out of his glove compartment. He pulled it free, checked the safety, and pointed it at Ed, whose own gun had clattered away.
Rudy ran out of the store dropping tampons as Keith assumed a shooter’s stance and squeezed two quick rounds into Ed’s ribcage. His body twitched with the impact of each slug and then lay still in the bright glow of the filling station, his pants twisted around his ankles and his penis lying across his belly like a dead mackerel. Blood began to ooze out from under him, searching for cracks and channels in the concrete as Mike and Texas struggled for the shining silver gun.
The struggle ended when Keith walked over and put Mike’s pistol in the would-be thief’s face.
A shocking spray of blood and brain splattered against the gas pumps. The man’s Rangers cap flew away and landed near Rudy’s feet. It had a ragged hole the size of a baby’s fist punched through the crown.
The three men looked at one another in the ringing silence.
The world had suddenly changed. They found that they were changing with it.
Strange days, indeed.
“Grab that last load you went in for,” Mike told Rudy, then bent down and took the former Rangers fan’s gun from his cold, dead fingers. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Keith took a step toward the Cherokee then stopped, his expression clouded, unable to recall what he’d been doing before the Suburban pulled into the lot.
“Grab that gun,” Mike said, pointing to Ed’s .45, lying several feet from the man’s outstretched hand. “And check their rig. See if they brought any spare ammunition.”
Keith nodded, grateful for the distraction.
Three minutes later they rolled back onto Valley View, heading west this time, back to Quail Street. Back home.
On the way they passed a brightly-lit Subway franchise. The booths were empty and the young girl behind the counter looked bored, ready to wrap up her meats and cheeses and close up for the night.
Rudy marveled at this, knowing that two blocks away a 7-Eleven had just crumbled off the face of the Earth.
Part Three:
The Living
1
Three days passed.
During those three days gunshots could be heard at a distance and the electricity went on and off, as if a heated battle were being waged around a master switch at the local substation.
The men of Quail Street (a subdued Larry Hanna included) stood in a knot at the end of Bud Iverson’s driveway, trying to divine which way the storm was heading. For the most part it seemed confined to town, but occasionally a charged volley would erupt much nearer.
Rudy suggested they might better use the time reinforcing their homes, nailing up plywood and bracing their doors with 2x4’s, working in pairs to get it up quickly and efficiently. At the same time he broached the subject of a last safe fallback room with Larry, reminding him of his bomb shelter.
“Sounds reasonable,” Larry allowed, nodding his head. “I’ll have to clear it out; we’ve been using it for storage for years; Christmas stuff mostly, lights and decorations¼ I guess we won’t be needing any of that.” The thought seemed to deflate him, as if there was little else to live for.
“Not until December anyway,” Rudy said, offering a hopeful smile. “Do you need help cleaning it out?”
Larry glanced back at his house, regarding it with puffed cheeks and squinty eyes, as if calculating how many men it would take to lift the whole structure off its foundation and move it ten feet to the left.
“I think Jan and I can probably manage, but I’ll holler if we come across anything that might take an extra hand or two.” He turned back. “How soon will we need it?”
“I’d say the sooner we start moving in supplies, the better,” Mike ventured. A gunshot punctuated this sentiment and the men turned toward Kennedy Street. The war sounded like it was getting closer, perhaps as little as a quarter-mile away. It was hard to say once the echoes died away.
“All right,” Larry said, his voice gray and sluggish, as if he hadn’t been sleeping. “Why don’t I get right on that.” He turned and retreated
toward his driveway.
“Well,” Keith said, hands on his hips, looking at the remainder of the group. “Where do we start?”
Bud and Rudy went to work on the east side of the street, beginning with the Iversons. Mike and Keith took up at the Sturlings.
“What about me?” Shane wanted to know, his eyebrow hoop gone and black eyeliner scrubbed away.
They put him on the Sturling’s rooftop with a rifle and a pair of binoculars.
2
Rudy held the sheet of plywood over the Iverson’s picture window while Bud hammered in the nails. They were long nails and took a long time to drive in, but once Bud got the top two corners secured, Rudy was able to let go of the sheet and pick up his own hammer.
“You know Larry a lot better than I do,” Bud said, pausing between windows to wipe his brow. “Do you think it’s a good idea to set up the safe room in his house?”
Rudy took a drink of water from his canteen. “He’s the one with the bomb shelter.” He shrugged and wiped his chin. “Can you think of somewhere better?”
Bud glanced next door at the Hanna’s. Larry and Jan might be inside clearing out the shelter, but all the curtains were drawn, so it was difficult to say what they might be doing. “It’s not the bomb shelter I’m questioning, it’s Larry. He doesn’t seem to be drifting on an even keel. I’m debating the wisdom of putting all our eggs in one basket and then giving them to him to hold.”
Rudy nodded. The same uncertainties had been nagging him for the past three days, yet he found himself wanting to defend Larry, or at least give him the benefit of the doubt. “I think he’s coming to terms with what’s happening; it’s just taking him a few more days to find his feet. I think the fact that he was out here today and willing to cooperate is a good sign.”
Bud reflected on this and nodded, donning his gloves again. “I’m just having a hard time reading him. One day he’s with us and the next he’s locked in his house, not answering the door or the phone. It gives me a bad feeling, right here.” He thumped his stomach. “I have this image of all of us pounding at his door while he’s inside his shelter, laughing at us.”
Rudy had visions as well, only in his Larry hadn’t been laughing, he’d been sobbing. All the rest amounted to the same though.
“Well, what do you suggest?”
Bud shook his head. “I’m not suggesting anything, mostly because I don’t know what we can do about it. I’d sure feel better if we had some sort of failsafe though, a guaranteed in.”
Rudy raised his eyebrows. “To a bomb shelter?”
“I know,” Bud sighed. “It doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
3
Mike was helping Keith with his windows and caught himself gazing at the house across the street, wondering what had become of the Navaros. The house was still dark, with the exception of the porch light, which burned both night and day. Mike found it odd that Don Navaro had sat through their initial meeting, nodding his head in agreement and making suggestions, smoking one cigarette after another, only to disappear later that night without a word to anyone, taking his wife and his three young sons with him.
Perhaps something had happened when he returned home, something to do with his in-laws as Rudy had suggested, or perhaps the impact of what they’d been discussing hadn’t hit him until then, when he was sitting down to dinner with his family, and he simply decided it would be easier to run. Hightail it west and hope to God he could stay ahead of it.
Or perhaps he saw something on television he couldn’t quite handle; there was a lot of that going around these days. After Chicago, the programs that aired had become increasingly disturbing, increasingly surreal. He himself had switched the set on yesterday afternoon to find what looked like local coverage of a PTA meeting airing on CNN. The meeting, he learned, was being broadcast from an Atlanta middle school, though instead of discussing school lunches and sex education, they’d chained up a black man infected with Wormwood and were hacking bits and pieces of him away with a cleaver and a saw until he stopped trying to attack and devour his captors. Mike had watched, fascinated and disgusted, until there was nothing left to torment but a bloody ribcage with a head on top, and even then the eyes and mouth twitched sluggishly, as if dreaming. It wasn’t until a fat man with a US flag on his sweatshirt put a gun to its forehead and pulled the trigger did the dreams stop, and that was just about all Mike wanted to know. In fact, he hadn’t turned on his set since.
“You’re slipping a little down there,” Keith said, murmuring around the nails in his mouth, the hammer poised over his right shoulder, ready to drive.
“Sorry,” Mike said, readjusting his end of the board. “Woolgathering.”
The next half minute or so was filled with the sound of the hammer doing its work, a racket that neither of them felt like talking around, but when it stopped Keith took the nails out of his mouth and asked Mike if he was having any bad dreams about the “incident” at 7-Eleven.
“Nothing that precise,” Mike answered, testing the grip of the nails on the siding. “The dreams I’ve been having the past few nights are more… generalized. Like finding myself in some strange, dark house and wondering where I am? Where the people are who live there?” He dusted his palms and looked at Keith. “How about you?”
“I keep finding myself back at those gas pumps with a gun pointed at my face, waiting for Rudy to call out those Stay Free maxi-pads.” Keith shook his head. “Sometimes he never does. Then last night it was you and him holding the guns on me.”
Mike regarded his young neighbor for a long moment. “You did the right thing, you know. They were going to kill us.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Keith nodded. “It’s just that it… it’s hard to get it out of my mind. Right and wrong have nothing to do with it; I just never had to shoot anyone before.” He looked down at the nails in his hand then looked back at Mike. “You know?”
Mike nodded.
“I guess it’s something I’ll have to work out on my own.”
“Sure,” Mike agreed. “If it’s any consolation, I think I’d be more worried if you weren’t having those dreams. It shows you’ve got a conscience.”
Keith flashed a brief smile, looking somewhat relieved.
“To tell you the truth though,” Mike went on, “I don’t think any of us have any right to be looking forward to our dreams. Not for some time to come yet.” His eyes wandered again to the house across the street. “Maybe Don had the right idea there… getting out while he could.”
Keith glanced over at the porch light. “Naomi had an idea about that,” he said.
Mike turned his head. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. She had this crazy notion that they never really left.”
4
Naomi Sturling emptied the shopping bag of all the first aid supplies and medications they’d gathered and spread them out on the Dawley’s dining room table, ready to draw up (as Pam suggested) an inventory of what they had.
“Be sure and check the expiration dates as you go,” Pam instructed. “Anything over four or five years old set aside for me to check. A lot of them are going to have lost their potency or just plain gone bad. It can happen a lot faster if people store their medications in the bathroom cabinet then fill the room up with steam every day from their shower. One year is the standard expiration date for prescription drugs, but if they’re properly stored they can last quite a bit longer. Pain pills and antibiotics we’re not going to have the luxury of being picky about, but there’s no point holding onto a five-year-old bottle of Viagra.”
“Nope,” Naomi agreed. “No point at all.”
The two women looked at one another across the cluttered expanse of the table then started to giggle. The giggles quickly turned to gales of helpless laughter.
Aimee Cheng walked out of the kitchen trailing the good smells of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, which she and Helen Iverson were fixing for twelve. “What’s funny?” she asked, a puzzled smile sketc
hed on her face.
“Pam and I were just talking about dysfunctional bottles of Viagra,” Naomi answered, snorting laughter out her nose.
Aimee looked doubtfully at the loose jumble of medications on the table.
It only made them laugh all the harder.
5
Shane Dawley put down the binoculars and turned on the radio. There was a slight breeze over the rooftops that sang with a seashell whisper against his earphones, but the stations were still broadcasting, still pleading with people to stay inside their houses and not participate in the wholesale looting that was occurring in some of the downtown areas. Troops from Camp Walter, a nearby army base, had been alerted and would be patrolling the streets and anyone caught looting would be shot on sight. The cycling message went on to give a list of phone numbers that listeners could call to report incidents or get help with various problems, most of them of a medical or psychological nature, though the station warned of long waits to get through. Two or three hours in some cases.
“As of yet there are no confirmed cases of the Yellowseed virus in this county,” a calm, recorded voice assured its listeners. “I repeat, there are no confirmed cases at this time in Bayard County.”
Shane switched off the radio as the message began to repeat itself. It was much the same up and down the dial: calm assurances, yet with a sense that there was no one behind the taped announcements; at least no one but a squad of armed soldiers ordered to secure the station and keep the messages rolling. For the past two days there had been very little variation: stay inside, don’t loot, troops are coming, shot on sight, no Yellowseed confirmed, and call these helpful numbers. Shane was beginning to wonder if any of it was true or simply designed to keep the population docile and off the streets, their doors locked tight as they sat and listened to a prerecorded message or a busy signal on the phone.
Wormwood Page 5
