The shotgun sang its one-note song and Mashburn clicked his heels at the end of his cord.
“Its head!” Keith shouted, to which Mike testily replied he had aimed at its head, but the thing’s legs and body kept getting in the way. “We need a rifle,” he said, plucking out the spent and smoking shell.
Rudy ground to a halt, huffing and puffing, holding his brand-new rifle. He looked up at the thief through the round rims of his glasses as if he’d long suspected such a thing could happen. It was not a confirmation that brought him any joy, but he accepted it for what it was: a truth.
Keith turned to him and pointed up. “Can you hit its head with that rifle?”
Rudy swallowed, his expression uncertain. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I haven’t had much practice.” He started to hand the rifle to Keith, but Keith shook his head.
“These are all tied up; chances are the next ones won’t be. They’re likely gonna be running down the street and pounding at your door. I can’t think of a better time to practice than right now.”
Rudy nodded, accepting this simple truth as well. He glanced back at his home, wishing Aimee would take his son back inside. This was not something he needed to witness: his father shooting at another man’s head. Still, this was what the world had become and there was nothing he could do about it.
“Find yourself a good angle,” Keith advised, “and get a bead on its head.”
The thing above them thrashed and snarled as if their intentions had been overheard.
“After you plug this one,” Keith went on, nodding toward Kennedy, “There are three more for you to practice on.”
2
As it turned out there were only two.
Helen Iverson had done a thorough enough job on Tad Kemper the first time that he was spared the dubious honor of coming back. Instead, he sat in the crotch of the Navaro’s apple tree and grinned at the sky as if God were playing a supreme joke on them all and he was the only one on the block in a position to really enjoy it.
One by one Rudy and the others shot the rest of them dead. Again.
Greg Mashburn took a bullet in the neck and two in the chest before Rudy finally found his mark. Each shot just seemed to make it angrier and angrier until the side of its skull blew out in a rusty plume and it stopped being angry for good.
Once this tactic appeared tried and true, the men attempted to get their wives to come out and practice their marksmanship on the other two, but all they got in return were looks of horror and disgust, as if it had been suggested they come out and have sex with some perfectly nice looking strangers.
“You’re going to have to get used to this,” Keith warned, shaking his head at Naomi, but she didn’t see it that way, at least not yet.
The same was true for Aimee and Pam, and Larry wasn’t even answering his door.
“So much for the bomb shelter,” Mike grumbled, gazing up at the Hanna’s living room window, watching the sly part in the curtains fall back into place.
“It’s still early,” Rudy asserted. “I wouldn’t count them out just yet.”
Mike sighed and turned away, shaking his head.
“Ask Bud Iverson how early he thinks it is.”
3
As the morning wore into afternoon, Rudy found himself thinking a good deal about Bud. He found himself wondering if they’d buried him deep enough.
Before the power failure effectively cut them off from the rest of the world, there had been several theories circulating on television and internet blogs concerning the origins and epidemiology of the phenomenon that had come to be known as Wormwood.
Initially, the thinking had been that it was spread like any other virus or contagion: by source to source contact, be it blood-borne or (more likely, due to the rapidity with which it spread) airborne. But there was a problem with this theory, Rudy realized, and the problem had to do with the three cases he and his neighbors had just shot dead. Not a one of which was breathing or exchanging potentially infectious materials at the time of the outbreak (unless, of course, the crows could be said to be carriers, which Rudy summarily dismissed because it didn’t fit the number of national cases).
A second theory he’d read of took a step into darker territory and held that the people killed or wounded by established cases took on the disease themselves, though they didn’t exhibit symptoms or become carriers themselves until after death. Yet again, at least on Quail Street, this theory didn’t hold true. Kemper and his buddies had been killed by bullets, not other carriers, and it had taken them almost a week to come back. From what Rudy had been seeing in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, areas of mass epidemic, the change took place in a matter of minutes, sometimes before emergency crews and family members could get the bodies out to the street to burn them.
A third theory, which had been gaining support when the electricity went dead, held that Wormwood wasn’t a germ or a virus at all, but a type of fallout or radiation spread throughout the atmosphere by the downed Yellowseed satellite. At first this was laughed off as science fiction or speculation, but the people doing the laughing were the same ones — grant researchers and government officials — who’d put the thing into orbit in the first place.
Proponents of the radiation model pointed to a map with an overlay of the satellite’s path of descent and a black “X” at the impact site, citing the first cases in a rural area of Pennsylvania and plotting the high density of subsequent cases cropping up along the westward arc of the burning satellite. It made a convincing argument, and it also explained why the phenomenon was traveling slowly but steadily westward despite natural barriers and rigid quarantine zones.
One man Rudy had seen on television likened the fallout to a long comet’s tail descending across the United States. While the epidemic appeared to be traveling in a westerly direction, what was actually happening was that the radioactive particles were taking longer to filter through the layers of atmosphere as they trailed back along the satellite’s line of descent. In keeping with that model, the longer the particles remained aloft the more dispersed they became due to factors such as wind currents and the Earth’s rotation. “That,” the man assured his audience, “is exactly what we’re seeing with Yellowseed.” He pointed to a map of North America overlaid with a menacing red fireball on a collision course with Willard, Pennsylvania, its long tail dissolving somewhere high over the waters of the Pacific Ocean. “The more time that passes, the more indistinct the tail of our satellite becomes, and the more widespread the contamination.
“Will that make a difference to those of you watching on the west coast?” The man shrugged. “Possibly. It all depends on how potent this thing is. To give you an example… if I were to open a jar of weapon’s-grade anthrax here in the studio, I’d kill two or three hundred people. If I were to release that same jar in an airburst above New York City, thousands if not millions would die.” He tapped the fading tail on his map. “Dilution or dispersion is no good if the potency remains high enough to kill; it simply means that more people will die. Yellowseed being a pet project of the Department of Defense, I don’t hold much optimism for a quick and easy fix, especially since no one’s stepping forward to tell us what it is or how to stop it. No one’s doing that because to do so would entail responsibility and blame; that means we as scientists have to spend precious time finding out what it is before we can begin the search for a solution, and at that rate this thing will have already run its course.”
The man folded his hands as if in resignation. “I’m aware that it’s not a particularly rosy or popular view at the moment, but I won’t lie to you. It’s a nightmare out there; most of you east of the Mississippi already know that.”
The program, as Rudy recalled, cut to a commercial immediately after this last statement. When it returned, the scientist with the sleepless eyes was gone, replaced with a smiling man who’d developed a brand-new Hollywood diet.
Rudy gazed down the street at Greg Mashburn, still hanging l
imply from his lamppost.
He wondered if it might be wise to dig up Bud and put a bullet in his head.
Just to be sure.
4
In the soft gray light of their bedrooms, the Navaros were slow to awaken, as if the tranquillizers that Don had fed them were still coursing through their bloodstreams, lying over them like stones. Of course their hearts were no longer beating so it followed that their blood (which had thickened and darkened in their veins, becoming visible through the skin) was no longer circulating. Their tissues, however, were still saturated with the drug, still lethargic and depressed, as if they’d been packed away in thick cotton wadding and left out in the summer sun.
So they were sluggish to open their eyes, to tumble themselves out of bed. Once up, they wandered from room to room as if searching, their footsteps dry and whispery against the carpet, like paper slippers.
Eventually they found something that triggered a response, an excitement they no longer found in one another. It came in pulses, in warm shades of red that moved back and forth across the front of the house.
In voices that called them brightly out of their sleep.
5
Keith decided the house was getting to be too much like a cave with the electricity gone and the windows boarded over. Rooms that were once light and familiar had grown brooding and indistinct over the past week, eerie with candles and long, flickering shadows, silent except for the sound of the wind trying to get in.
Time slowed down to an almost meaningless crawl. A clock that ticked but whose hands never moved, even when one wasn’t looking.
It was the perfect breeding ground for hopelessness and despair. A sense that life had ended and they were trapped inside a cosmic parlor or antechamber, waiting for Death to come and collect them. Or perhaps (worse still) they were simply forgotten.
The excitement of the morning had left Keith feeling restless and edgy, as if he ought to be doing something: standing guard on the roof or walking a beat up and down the street, rifle in hand. Anything but what he was doing, which was nothing.
Shane Dawley was up on his parent’s roof with a gun and a whistle, but so far Wormwood was keeping its distance, sight-seeing through the more densely-populated streets of town. There had been gunshots, distant screams and black smoke billowing here and there, but as of yet no one had come calling, infected or otherwise.
Morning had given way to afternoon and, after drawing lots for a watch, they’d gone back inside their homes to eat lunch and consider what ought to be done now that the nightmare had finally appeared. A meeting was planned for later that afternoon, over at the Cheng’s, but that was still hours away.
Looking pale and wan, Naomi had retreated to the bedroom with a book she’d borrowed from Pam or Helen, leaving Keith to pace about the dim confines of the house, to wander the same dead-ends and cul-de-sacs, alone with his gray, indoor thoughts. He picked up a magazine (likely the last issue of Field & Stream he’d ever receive) and tried to lose himself in its well-thumbed pages.
An advertisement for a Winchester rifle caught his eye, with a six-point buck gazing calmly (almost majestically) into a pair of stylized crosshairs. Keith blinked and found himself beneath the Kennedy Street bridge, squinting through a similar scope at something that was neither calm nor majestic. Something that accepted the bullets he fired with the dull indignity of a rotten tree stump.
He let the magazine close of its own accord and tossed it back to the coffee table, the morning’s horrors playing themselves out in an endless loop, haunting him, conspiring in the shadows with the two men he’d killed down at the 7-Eleven.
When Rudy knocked quietly on his door, wondering if he could help him out with a certain job that needed doing, Keith could have spun him around on the doorstep and kissed him.
6
That is, until he found out what Rudy wanted him to do.
Had it been simple gruntwork, a chance to get outside and use his muscles to hammer nails or haul supplies from one place to another, that would have been fine; but to dig up poor Bud Iverson (who they’d just laid to rest, for God’s sake!) and practice target shooting on his head; no, that was just another ghost to track back inside the house; not at all what he had in mind.
Still, judging from recent events, he couldn’t deny that Rudy had a point. It was definitely a job that needed looking into, and better to take care of it in the cold light of day than wake up in the middle of the night and find Bud crashing through the window.
So they had Aimee ask Helen over on the pretext of putting together some food for the meeting that afternoon, stopped by the Dawley’s and told Shane what they were up to, then wrapped their shovels and Rudy’s rifle in a long piece of tarpaulin and carried them across the street to the Iverson’s garden.
“Let’s make this as quick as we can,” Rudy suggested, donning work gloves while Keith spread out the tarp to catch the soil.
“My thoughts exactly.”
They glanced about the back yard, saw that no one was watching, then attacked the ground in short, swift strokes.
7
Mike Dawley was making love to his wife for the first time in eight months when the whistle sounded, screaming in its high, shrill voice from above as Pam was climbing toward her second orgasm and as Mike sensed an embarrassing amount of semen drawing back, getting ready to burst from his swollen end of his cock. At the shriek of the whistle, however, they stopped dead, looked at one another in dawning panic, then scrambled madly out of bed, reaching for their clothes as the whistle continued its warbling cry and the rifle punched sharp holes in the stained fabric of the afternoon.
8
“Go downstairs!” Larry Hanna told his wife, taking his face away from the part in the curtains long enough to see that she was behind him. “Take the boys and get down to the shelter!”
“What’s happening?” Jan cried, her voice breaking into a terrified bleat the moment she saw the expression on her husband’s face. A stark, pale fear had gripped him, instantly contagious. Instead of calling her children, she took a step toward the window, wanting to see what was swooping down on them, its dark wings spread.
“Get Mark and Brian and get the hell downstairs!” Larry shouted, reaching out and giving her a rough shove, one that sent her backpedaling toward the sofa.
“What is it?” she screamed, tears running down her face. “Tell me what you see out there!”
He tensed and let the curtain drop, reaching for his rifle. Rudy had knocked on his door and returned it the day after they buried Bud. He’d asked Larry how preparations were going with the bomb shelter and Larry had shut the door in his face. He’d regretted it later, but now, after what he’d just seen out the second story window, he knew he’d done the right thing.
He looked at his wife then slid back the bolt to insert a bullet. “The Dawley kid is up on the roof shooting at something,” he told her, shoving the bolt back into place.
“Shooting at what?” she wanted to know, an ugly crack running down her face. The days of isolation were taking a toll on her.
“I don’t know,” he lied. “Something down the block. Something I couldn’t see.”
What he had seen was Shane Dawley blowing his goddamn whistle as he shot down one of the Navaro kids. It wasn’t Zack — the one Brian sometimes played with — but Zack’s younger brother, Chase. He had been crossing the road in a sleepy kind of shuffle when the rifle snapped and knocked the toddler down to the asphalt, a piece of his shoulder turning to vapor, a rust-colored spray against the white of his t-shirt.
As the whistle blew, the kid got slowly to his feet again, as if it were all just a bad dream. He grimaced, took a step toward the Sturling’s house, then fell down again, this time after the rifle knocked his head sharply back. After that, the kid stopped moving, but from his vantage Larry saw his mother come tottering out the front door in next to nothing; a silky veneer of white satin that looked a size too small for her. She was moving in that same slee
py step, in no particular hurry to get to her fallen son.
The next time Larry looked out the window, his wife was finally moving downstairs to the shelter and the street was in chaos.
9
When Naomi Sturling heard the alarm, she put down her book and went to the front door, peeking out just in time to see the little boy from across the street fall down in a hard splash of his own blood.
“Oh my God!” she screamed, her hand flying to her mouth in shock. At that point she stopped thinking altogether and merely reacted, throwing the door open and running down the lawn to where he lay limply in the street.
Dimly, she heard her husband calling her name, warning her back in the house, but by the time it sank in it was already too late. She knelt down beside the boy, realizing as she did so that he’d been shot at least twice, and that he looked a lot worse than two bullets could possibly account for. It was obvious that he was dead, but he’d already begun to decompose: his eyes were glazed; a shrunken pair of cataracts, and his skin was deeply bruised, corrupt in places, like a badly-handled piece of fruit. And as she was noticing these things, it escaped her attention that Shane Dawley’s rifle was still firing, that the boy’s mother was almost on top of her, that her husband and Rudy Cheng were sprinting toward her with a pair of dirty shovels and screaming for her to run.
A shadow fell across her and she looked up into Irene Navaro’s eyes. Her first impression was that of an eclipse, that something dead and gray had swallowed up the sun. That its light was shining through Irene’s eyes, but dimly, like a powerful flashlight shining through layers of skin, giving off a bloody glow.
Then both the sun and the moon toppled from the sky.
Irene grasped Naomi’s head in her hands and started to pull. There was nothing gentle or neighborly at all in her touch, but something like the hardened grip of a schoolyard bully who’s taking a soccer ball away and means to have it no matter what.
Wormwood Page 9
