Shane’s head rose slightly in silhouette against the sky. “Where are they?” he shouted back down.
Keith pointed. “Two here,” he said, then moved his arm, “and one up behind your place.”
Shane hesitated. “There were two of them running toward the house.”
Mike frowned. “Are you sure.”
“Positive.”
Mike rose up on the balls of his feet, ready to drop again if someone took a potshot at him. He could see the back of his house, but it was dark and mute, holding its breath, wives and children somewhere inside its belly. He glanced fretfully at Keith. “You don’t think one of them got inside, do you?”
Keith was frowning; clearly the same concern had crossed his mind. “It’s awful quiet,” he conceded.
Mike raised an eyebrow. “Is that good or bad?”
“Well good, I suppose.” Keith shook his head. “But I think we better check it out right away.”
Mike nodded and glanced about, looking for Bud or Rudy. “Where the hell is everyone?”
“We ought to check that out too. Could be that one or two of them got tagged.”
Mike surveyed the land between the creek and his back patio, looking at it in a way he’d never honestly considered before, as if it were a battlefield, laden with mines and foxholes. “How do you want to go about this?” he asked. “You’re trained in this sort of thing.”
“Straight from here to my house,” Keith said, his eyes checking the bushes, marking the windows, “then under the eaves to your place. We’ll cut between the two houses and go in through the front, that way if anyone’s watching they’ll lose sight of us. They won’t know where the hell we’re going.”
Mike nodded. “All right.”
“I’ll go first,” Keith said, checking his gun. “Stay spaced apart and keep your head down, especially crossing in front of the windows.”
“Okay.” Mike took a deep breath. “What about Shane?”
“Tell him to keep his eyes open. He can cover us.”
“I mean is he going to be safe up there?”
“As safe as any of us, I guess. He did some good shooting.”
Mike hesitated. “I don’t want to lose him.”
“I know you don’t.” Keith studied the rooftop and the wide stretch of lawn. “But right now it’s out of our hands. The sooner we get the area secured, the safer we’ll all be.”
“Let’s do it then,” Mike said, impatient for it to happen.
Keith nodded, positioning himself to run while Mike signaled their intention to move to his son.
Shane gave him a thumb’s-up, reshouldering the rifle.
“Wait until I get to the back of the house before you follow,” Keith said over his shoulder, then took off across the grass, bent over in a crouching stride.
A few seconds later Mike was pounding in his footsteps.
12
Pam Dawley was moving up the basement stairs when the door above her opened, revealing a fat, scruffy-looking man she’d never seen before. He had a rifle in his hands and, despite his angry shout to stay where she was, Pam backpedaled and ducked out of sight before he could take aim and stop her. The bullet he fired exploded within the close confines of the stairwell and smashed through a corner of the basement wall, blasting out splinters of ragged pine and a chalky cloud of atomized drywall.
The basement filled up with screams and the women turned like gazelles, stampeding to the far side of the room, Aimee Cheng herding and shoving her three children ahead of her.
The Dawley basement was not an especially large one. It had two small bedrooms, a bathroom with a shower stall, an unfinished space where the furnace and washer and dryer could chug and belch to their heart’s content, and a somewhat larger room that could be used for recreation or storage. What windows it had were small and set high on the walls, revealing only overgrown shrubs or pale glimpses of sky. The only exit was narrow and opened (with effort, since it was seldom used) into a concrete stairwell leading to the back yard. All of which did them little good since it stood, with the bath and bedrooms, on the opposite side of the interior stairs, leaving them nowhere except the dry darkness of the furnace room to retreat to.
Tad Kemper knew none of this, but he knew he had them on the run; that he was the wolf and they were the rabbits, their hearts thump-thumping as they scurried to the dead-end reaches of their warren. There was a fleeting moment of doubt as he turned the blind corner at the bottom of stairs, an unsettling image of one of them pointing a trembling shotgun in his direction, but as he swung his rifle around and crouched behind it, the room stood empty in front of him.
Confidence and certainty came flooding back. “Ladies?” he called, a toothy smile between his lips.
A hushed whisper met his ears: pleas for mercy… a prayer to a god who no longer mattered? His rabbits were hiding, shivering against one another in the dark.
“Come out, come out wherever you are!” he called, advancing slowly around a chipped coffee table, his bug-eyed reflection creeping across a gray television screen from left to right.
“Your men are all dead!” he laughed, pausing a moment to enjoy the joke. “Maybe you didn’t hear it, but I just shot the last one upstairs… an old duffer in a gray sweatshirt. Blew his fucking guts out all over the dining room table.”
A strangled sob broke from the darkened doorway, accompanied by more whispers.
“Go upstairs and look if you don’t believe me,” Tad invited, his rifle like a stiff cock in his hands, the thought of shooting it enough to get him off. “Go ahead,” he grinned, filling the doorway. “I can wait.”
A pale, lithe shape moved against the shadows. Far back against the brooding gray box of the furnace, a small child started to cry.
“Leave us alone,” a woman’s voice said, cracked and aged, hidden somewhere in the gloom.
“Sorry,” Tad said sadly, shaking his head, “but I have plans for you ladies. Each and every one of you.”
“Please,” another voice implored, younger and more supple to his ear. “At least let the children go.”
“Where will they go?” Tad wondered. “There’s no one left to take care of them.” He grinned.
Shifting shapes amongst the shadows. Fresh sobs as he stepped with his rifle through the doorway.
“I’m warning you,” the first voice choked, thick with emotion, ready to break into pieces.
Tad laughed softly and took another step.
Then something clicked in the dark and his smile melted clean away.
13
Even before the grinning, troll-shaped monster had come pounding down the stairs, Helen Iverson had known in an essential part of her that something outside had gone wrong. Horribly wrong. Being a practical, level-headed woman of Midwestern stock, she gave little to no credence to the notion of ESP or precognition or whatever nonsense they were calling it these days, but she knew that her partner of 37 years had been taken from her. It was as simple as a familiar hand dropping from her grasp, nothing more and nothing less.
The gray sweatshirt Bud had been wearing…
The thought of facing the world alone…
The troll in the doorway laughed and a piece of her turned silently to stone.
“Leave us alone,” she told it, taking Bud’s pistol from its holster without even realizing what she was doing. She touched the safety, felt it move beneath her finger. Since Rudy and the others had come back from the quick-mart, Bud had fitted her with a shoulder holster and insisted she take the gun with her whenever she left the house. Now it was in her hand and she thanked Bud for that, though in her heart she knew he was dead. She thanked him for teaching her how to shoot when they were younger. When the world was brighter, more vibrant.
The troll blurred in the doorway when Aimee asked it to let the children go.
A tremendous counterbalance tipped inside her, like an old tree coming begrudgingly out of the ground, its long roots torn and black with soil.
“I’m warning you…” Helen sobbed, though by that point she had already made up her mind. To let this creature run amuck, to allow it to take even one step further, would be an affront to everything she and Bud held dear or believed in; to order and decency, to civilization and the ideals of justice and humanity, not to mention God and morality. And if God was somehow responsible for letting this monster loose upon the world, He’d also put the gun in her hand to stop it.
The troll’s head swung her way. It laughed and took a step.
14
Rudy spotted Mike and Keith rounding the far side of the Dawley house and hurried to join them on the front doorstep.
“How many are left?” he wondered, his heart beating rapidly in his chest, his blood bright with adrenaline.
“Just one, we think,” Keith answered, crouched in the shadow of the eaves, eyes sweeping the far side of the street.
“You’re not certain?” Rudy looked ready to run back to his spruce.
Mike put a hand on the front door, as if feeling for fire; divining what lay on the other side. He glanced back at Rudy before grasping the knob. “There are three bodies down at the creek. Shane thought one might have made it to the back of the house.”
“And he’s inside?” Rudy rose from his crouch, the thought of his wife and children trapped inside with such a desperate man suddenly became intolerable, a torment.
“We thought it might be a good idea to check,” Keith said sourly. His eyes narrowed, glimpsing a hitch in the curtains at the Hanna’s across the cul-de-sac. “Where’s Bud and Larry?” he asked.
Rudy swallowed. “Larry panicked and ran back to his house.”
“Motherfuck,” Keith swore.
“I’m not sure where Bud is.”
“Well I’m going in,” Mike said flatly, turning the doorknob and inching forward, his eye to the widening crack between the door and the jamb. His face and jaw went through a series of contortions, like a man shaving with an uncertain razor. He glanced back at Rudy and Keith. “Entry looks clear.”
Keith nodded and the three men crept into the house.
Down a tunnel of silent hallway, they saw Bud’s body splayed beneath the dining room table. His blood was a still pond that reflected the muted sunlight.
“Oh shit,” Mike swore, his voice dry and despondent, a coarse whisper. “I thought he was going to circle around the bridge,” he protested, as if, allowing that, Bud couldn’t possibly be in his dining room, couldn’t possibly be dead.
“He must have seen something that changed his mind,” Keith said, letting it go at that.
A woman’s voice moaned beneath them, muffled to blunted emotion by the carpet and the floorboards, to each man sounding like his wife.
Then a man’s dark laughter rose behind it and they realized they’d come too late.
“Where are the stairs?” Rudy cried, rising to his full height as the first gunshot cracked below.
15
A blast like a sonic boom ripped through the room and Tad felt his face go numb. He reached up and found his hat gone, with something like yolk and broken eggshells running down the right side of his head.
A vengeful angel stepped out of the shadows, pointing a gun at him. His rifle was no longer in his hands. It lay at his feet, miles away. He looked at his hands and saw that they were painted red, with flecks of cottage cheese and hair stuck to his fingers.
The angel bared her teeth in a terrible grimace and shoved the gun into his surprised face.
He heard a distant explosion, like artillery falling, and that was all.
16
If there was any doubt the world had changed, it ended that afternoon on Quail Street, even before they climbed out of the basement and saw Bud Iverson’s body where it had fallen beneath the table.
The basement itself was a crimson stain, a house of horrors that each and every one of them had to walk through, the children included. Helen had done a very thorough job with her husband’s gun, a fact that she made no apologies for.
Upstairs, she took in the dining room as if it were a sight she’d already seen, somewhere deep within a dream. A short sound escaped her, like a seasoned fighter taking a sharp body blow, then her face hardened, as if reminded of the others around her. A single long tear rolled down her cheek, though she seemed unconscious of it.
Pam Dawley went to the linen closet and came back with a thick blanket, which she spread out on the kitchen floor for Bud. Naomi Sturling pulled back the dining table and her husband crouched down with Mike and Rudy to move Bud into the receiving arms of the blanket.
They carried him home and, after they left, Helen washed him and dressed him in his best gray suit.
Later, as she was sewing a fresh sheet around him for a shroud, the electricity went off in the cul-de-sac for good. The reading lamp in the corner winked out but she hardly noticed. Later still, as twilight fell, she lit candles around him to keep her vigil.
Shortly after eight o’clock, a knock sounded on her front door: light and apologetic, embarrassed by the intrusion. Helen rose from the bed, smoothed the wrinkles out of her dress, and went to let them in.
Rudy and Shane had dug a grave for Bud in the garden and, with the moon looking down over their shoulders, they buried him there.
All of Quail Street.
17
Tad Kemper and his three companions didn’t fare so well.
It had been Mike’s intention to bury them across the creek or below the bridge, somewhere out of sight and mind. He was mulling over the various possibilities when Keith came in from the back yard to help him carry Tad (yes, they’d gone through their wallets, putting a name — and in Tad’s case, a face — to each of the bodies) out to join the others. They were stacked beneath the shady arch of the bridge, waiting for a grave to be decided upon and a hole dug large enough to receive all four of them.
Mike had spent the better part of the morning in his basement, his wife’s rubber gloves stretched tightly over his hands as he stripped Tad of any useful items in his pockets, then rolled him up in a black plastic tarp. He worked gingerly at first, not wanting to touch anything, disgusted with the congealed splatters of blood and brain, but by the time he had the tarp rolled out, he’d become somewhat accustomed to Tad and even found the stomach to marvel at Helen’s handiwork. With two rounds she’d managed to rob him of any intellect or identity he might have possessed. Portions of his lower jaw were still intact, but everything above that was broken into pieces and open to interpretation. It was a lesson in ballistics and anatomy that Mike was unlikely to forget.
“What do you want to do with them?” Keith asked, his hands in his pockets, eyes regarding the black, bungee-wrapped parcel against the wall.
“I guess dig a hole anywhere that’s easy and out of sight,” Mike sighed, peeling off his yellow gloves and looking at his hands in distaste. They were pruned and clammy, fishbelly white. “Some spot where we won’t hit a lot of rocks or tree roots.”
Keith nodded as if he’d decided that much himself, but looked like he had something more to suggest.
Mike narrowed his eyes. “Did you have something else in mind?”
“Actually, I do,” Keith admitted, “but I don’t know how you’ll take it, much less the rest of the block.”
Mike smiled thinly, wondering if the day could hold any more shocks or surprises. “I guess we won’t know until you tell me.”
Keith hesitated. “It’s sort of barbaric; medieval, you might say… but it might keep this sort of thing from happening again.”
“Well I’m all for that,” Mike said. “Let’s hear it.”
Keith told him his idea and watched as Mike’s expression shifted; not as badly as he’d feared, but enough to know that he’d been right: it was barbaric. Yet at the same time it held a certain persuasion, a logic seldom seen outside times of war or anarchy; but then, hadn’t they fallen on such times?
The black bundle against the wall seemed to indicate that they had. That it
wasn’t necessarily a new world they were facing, but a very old one.
Mike nodded, acknowledging the merits of the idea. “I can tell you right now the women aren’t going to like it. They’d just as soon forget these bastards.”
Both men, however, found their wives unexpectedly easy to sway. Barbaric or not, they had no desire to repeat the experience. They expressed some initial concerns for the younger children, but Rudy laid these aside, reminding them that his son and daughters had been trapped in the Dawley’s basement as well. The experience had already marked them, and this idea that Mike and Keith were proposing might give them a sense of justice, or closure, or simply a reason to hope it wouldn’t happen again.
“If these four men are the worst we have to face in the coming days, I’ll be extremely grateful,” Rudy concluded. “So if there are no other objections, I think we should go ahead.”
There were objections, of course; most of them from Larry and Jan, who had two young sons of their own; but since no one had seen Mark or Brian Hanna set foot out of the house in the last few days (and since Larry himself had been of little to no help during the recent crisis), these were overruled or outright ignored.
And since they were still living in a democracy, at least to the border of Kennedy Street, Keith’s proposal was carried.
Helen lent Rudy the keys to Bud’s old pickup and the men of Quail Street (including Shane but minus Larry, who had left the meeting in a huff) drove through the Sturling’s yard to the creek and brought back the four corpses.
The women (minus Jan, who’d followed in her husband’s footsteps) remained at the Cheng’s to make placards out of posterboard left over from Sarah’s 7th grade science project and an assortment of waterproof markers.
18
Wormwood Page 7
