When Naomi refused to give it up, Irene made a wet, hissing sound behind her teeth and leaned down to take a bite out of Naomi’s scalp. Awakened from her stupor by the warm splash of blood in her mouth, Irene held on tenaciously, gnawing down through bone and brain. When Keith reached her she was dug into his wife’s head like an enormous tick, bright red blood running down her chin and spreading across the white satin of her nightgown.
He swung the shovel into the small of Irene’s back, the blade biting into the flesh there and releasing a grim putrescence. A slow trickle of rust. She seemed not to notice, so intent was she on the soft, sweet window in Naomi’s skull.
Keith roared and hit her again, this time swinging the shovel down over his shoulder, getting some real muscle into it and slamming the blade down flat atop Irene’s head. That seemed to get her attention. Naomi fell out of her grasp and slumped down beside the boy, her eyes wide with shock, as if she were turning end over end, falling down a dark and bottomless hole.
Rudy caught a passing glimpse of the damage Irene had done and knew that she was going to die, perhaps even before the current crisis was over. He thought bitterly of his rifle, leaning against the alder in the Iverson’s back yard, three or four steps from the hole they’d been digging. In the sudden commotion he’d forgotten it; or rather, it had seemed more imperative to get to Naomi than to backtrack, especially with the shovel in his hand. Keith, apparently, had thought the same.
Irene’s lips curled back like the petals of an exotic flower, something moist and tropical and grossly repellant. A fleshy corsage a sensible girl would never let anywhere near her breast. Rudy tilted his shovel over his shoulder like a slugger about to knock one out of the park. Keith slipped around him while Irene was distracted and crouched down beside his wife. A low moan rose from the pavement, one of dead realization and despondency, and Keith began to drag his wife up the lawn toward the dark hatch of his front door, leaving Rudy alone with his shovel and the late Mrs. Navaro.
She shuffled toward him, her arms outstretched, eyes black against the falling sunlight, Naomi’s blood dripping like saliva from her open mouth. Rudy heard a sudden volley of gunshots, voices screaming from other places, but he was afraid to take his eyes off Irene.
He swung his shovel and struck her hard across the temple, the blade ringing in the street like a poorly-made gong. It knocked her off-balance for a step, but seemed a lacking deterrent, more a nuisance than a threat. Grimacing, Rudy adjusted his grip on the handle and turned his club into a spear, a weapon he could jab and stick at her rather than swing.
Her breasts sagged against her bloodied nightgown as she approached, the nipples flat and dead, no longer capable of becoming chilled or excited. Rudy took a step back and to the side. He threw the shovel forward and jerked it back, a deep, crescent-shaped wound gaping in her face, slicing across the bridge of her nose and down her right cheek, spilling out a gore that looked like rancid chutney. Something made out of rotten pie cherries. The smell alone was enough to repel him.
Rudy backpedalled and almost collided with Don, Irene’s chain-smoking husband. Don had apparently wandered out the front door of his house while Rudy’s back had been turned, and this was what the shouting voices had been trying to warn him about. It looked like Shane had been running interference for him as well, because Don had already picked up two or three bullet wounds in his short walk down the driveway: one in the chest that should have brought down a deer, one in the neck that caused his head to loll oddly, and an angry channel that had grazed his cheek and carried away most of his left ear. None of them appeared to be fatal, whatever that meant anymore.
For a dangerous moment Rudy froze between the two of them, husband and wife, unsure what to do, which way to turn. His shovel was drawn back, ready to strike again, and since it was more or less aimed at Irene he threw it forward with a savage grunt, catching her full in the face again. When he pulled it free, her jaw hung limp and broken, like a door whose pins have been pulled out of its hinges. It dangled toward her breastbone, stretched in an impossible yawn.
Good, Rudy thought, congratulating himself. At least she couldn’t bite him now.
He pivoted to try the same trick on Don and saw a third figure approaching, this one in bare feet and an unbuttoned shirt flagging out behind him. To Rudy’s relief he saw it was Mike and he was running from the far end of the block with a shotgun in hand.
“Get back! Get away from them!” Mike shouted, his feet slapping the pavement as he brought the gun forward, coming to a stop and seating it against his shoulder. Rudy threw his shovel at Don, chipping a shallow divot in his ribcage, and then ran, dodging Irene’s outstretched arms and nearly tripping over her dead son on his way toward the west side of the street.
The shotgun boomed behind him and Don’s head became a mass of raw hamburger, a walking meatball. He stumbled, fell, and then slowly started to get up again. Mike stepped up close to Irene, his face a pale grimace, screaming as he blew her head from her shoulders with one infallible pull. It lifted away from her body, bounced lopsidedly, and then came to a full stop before her legs gave up and her body crumpled.
Don had regained his feet and was turning around in slow circles like a broken toy, feeling the hazy air with both hands as if attempting (without benefit of eyes or ears or nose) to reacquire his former neighbors.
Mike started to raise the shotgun to finish him off but the rifle rang out and Shane beat him to it. Don’s bleary red head snapped back with the force of the bullet and he dropped to the pavement without further protest.
Mike turned toward his son, lifted a trembling okay sign on the end of his arm, and let the shotgun’s barrel droop toward the bloodstained asphalt.
10
A profound silence fell over Quail Street.
Three bodies lay in the street and a garish trail of blood bumped over the curb in front of the Sturling’s and disappeared inside the house, leaving a dark smear upon the grass.
Rudy picked up his shovel and Mike took up the one Keith had dropped and together they went from corpse to corpse, probing them first to see if they got a reaction, then using the tools to decapitate the two whose heads were still attached, just to be sure.
To his dying day, Rudy knew he’d never forget the feeling of stepping on the blade and working it down through two-year-old Chase’s pale and slender neck. As the last stubborn cord was severed, the boy’s eyelids seemed to slacken and something as grateful as a sigh eased from his open mouth.
It left Rudy cold, shivering.
He looked at Mike and Mike looked back at him. Neither of them had to say a word.
They both knew how many sons the Navaros had.
And as far as the open door on the Sturling’s side of the street…
Well, that would have to be looked into as well.
11
While attention was focused on the opposite end of Quail Street, a separate (and for the most part, unknown) crisis was developing at the Hanna’s. Jan had left her husband standing at the living room window, but when she went down to collect Mark and Brian, their two sons, they were nowhere to be found. What’s more, the door to the backyard was standing wide open.
She called their names, the first bright stitches of panic working through her. The sight of an open door was enough to jolt her these days, and when she called a second time and still got no answer, she clutched her hands to her face and screamed for Larry.
He came pounding down the stairs, his rifle leading the way. After the things he’d just witnessed upstairs (and from the pitch of his wife’s voice), he almost expected the rec room to be painted with blood.
“What is it?” he shouted, eyes bulging, his head whipping from side to side, but there was nothing for them to catch on except the weeping figure of his wife.
He realized the door was open, that a bright oblong of sunlight was standing against the opposite wall, standing where no such oblong had a right to be. The thought of his two sons streaked acr
oss the room like a ghost and his wife’s panic exploded inside him like a fireball, scorching his nerve-endings and leaving him trembling.
“Where are they?” he screamed, his voice a raw wound, ragged and glistening, as if they were already lost.
“I can’t find them!” she screamed back, her face livid, two red marks where her hands had been. “They won’t answer!”
“Did you look in their rooms?” he shouted, resisting the urge to stride across the room and slap her. The very sight of her in such a condition made it hard for him to think.
No, she realized, she hadn’t. But even so, their bedrooms weren’t that far away; even with their doors shut they should have heard her, especially now that the television and computer were defunct. Yet she hadn’t checked and Larry seemed to recognize this fact in her eyes. He thrust his finger toward the hall and told her to look. To check the bathroom and the closets and underneath their beds while she was at it; anyplace two scared boys might conceivably squeeze themselves.
In the meantime, he was going out to check the back yard.
12
“Well?” Mike sighed, his eyes on Rudy. “Which first?”
“The Navaro’s,” Rudy decided, gazing at the open doorway, “but I need to get my rifle. I left it in Bud and Helen’s back yard.”
Mike raised an inquiring eyebrow, wondering what Rudy and Keith had been up to with shovels and rifles in the Iverson’s back yard.
Rudy briefly explained as the two of them cut through the narrow strip of lawn between the two houses, both keeping a cautious eye on the shrubs and windows along the way, mindful that there was still a young boy wandering about, not to mention his infant brother.
They rounded the corner leading to the Iverson’s garden and stopped dead. Something was thrashing about in the raw dirt, its head and arms tangled in a torn and soiled bedsheet, trying desperately to claw its way out of the hole Rudy and Keith had dug. Its dead hands clutched at the loose soil and pulled it fruitlessly back into the grave.
“Shit,” Mike swore, his thumb pulling back the twin hammers of the shotgun.
The thing heard them. It turned around and made a sound like gas escaping from a torn bladder.
It was Bud; his eyes black, his teeth choked with topsoil.
An awful scream swooped across the yard, shocking them both. Bud turned to track it like a shark sensing a panicked splash.
Helen Iverson was standing at the far end of the patio, as white as a ghost, her expression conveying the dawning horror of one who thinks she’s buried her husband alive.
A strangulated moan rose from Bud and, forgetting the pistol he’d given her to protect herself, she ran to him.
13
The basement door standing open behind him, Larry moved out across the lawn like an astronaut leaving the safety of his capsule to take his first walk across the hostile vacuum of outer space. His eyes tried to see everywhere at once, giving him a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if the Earth were turning behind his back, throwing up the undigested remains of its dead.
“Mark?” he called warily, as if afraid of being overheard. “Brian?”
He heard a rustling in the lazy mass of junipers along the back fence and froze, his gun coming around and leveling in that direction. His eldest son crawled out into the faded sunlight, his shirt torn and his eyes fifty years older. His hair was full of dead needles.
“Mark?” Larry whispered, uncertain, his rifle still pointed at the boy. He felt a twitch jump through his trigger finger as the boy broke cover and bolted past like a rabbit, swallowed up by the basement door. Larry just had time to register an angry crisscross of cuts and scratches on his son’s back and arms before the door swung shut with a loud bang.
“Mark?” Larry called, the barrel of the gun drooping as he was confronted with the mute face of his own house, the door shut and the windows boarded over.
“Mark, where’s your brother?” he shouted, the sound of his voice bouncing off the siding. He realized that he was floating alone in open space, the hatch of his capsule screwed shut. There was a single bullet in the breach of his rifle and nothing to replace it with on this side of the door.
He turned back to the junipers, reasoning if one son had been hiding there the other must be as well. He managed seven or eight paces from the house when another noise, less furtive, caught his ear. He turned toward it, looking north up the rising hillside, and saw something that made his breath stop. Brian was laid out on his back at the edge of the lawn, not moving, and another boy was down on his hands and knees, leaning over him.
Giving him CPR, Larry thought at first. CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
His heart lurched, sending him stumbling over a seamless boundary that separated his life from that of his five-year-old son. He sprinted across the yard and was almost upon them before he realized, before he really saw what was happening.
It wasn’t mouth-to-mouth the kid was performing, it wasn’t CPR…
He was tearing out the bottom of Brian’s jaw with his teeth, devouring the soft flesh of his unprotected neck as if it were a particularly savory piece of chicken.
“Shit,” he heard someone swear, worlds away, and then a haggard scream raked down his spine.
Four-year-old Zack Navaro, who in life had often played trucks or soldiers with Brian in the back yard, looked up from the bloody tatters of his friend’s throat, saw Larry standing over him, and made a curdling noise like an old tomcat protecting a plump gray sparrow.
Larry saw the light of Wormwood in Zack’s eyes: a faint glow like a raging fever inside an otherwise empty skull. It gazed back at him, utterly alien, and he swung the heavy barrel of his rifle around, bringing it to bear inches from the boy’s face. Blood and flecks of pulpy gore were smeared across Zack’s chin, painting his teeth and dripping in long streaks down his neck, and Larry realized that this had all been stolen from him. That because of this his son would die and there was no good or God to be found in it, no matter how long he stared.
His face twisted. Tears rolled from his eyes and a strangulated sob, as bitter as black vomit, rose from his throat.
He tensed his stomach and pulled the trigger, expecting a sharp report but hearing only a dull snap, like two stones kissing in a dry riverbed. He looked down at the rifle in disappointment; it felt inert in his hands, a shape poured out of cheap metal and made to hang in a den rather than fire live rounds.
Zack Navaro stared up at him. Half a second before he tumbled over, Larry thought one of his eyes had widened, and then he saw the hole shot through the back of his head, bloodless and clean.
He pulled back the bolt and ejected the spent shell, his hands suddenly trembling.
14
Mike Dawley watched Helen run toward her husband’s grave with the slow clarity of a dream, one he’d suffered through a good many times and now knew every movement by heart. It carried with it the inevitable feeling of déjà vu, of circumstances spiraling down to a textbook conclusion.
“Helen!” Rudy cried, his arms turned into shovels, which was a bit like something out of a dream itself. “Don’t!”
The words flashed through Mike’s mind a heartbeat before his neighbor spoke them aloud and he brought up the shotgun according to script, squeezing off a single, hastily-aimed shell before Helen fouled his line of sight. The scattering of pellets caught a piece of Bud, peppering his back and shoulders, but from that distance it might as well have been a clean miss. The only thing that was going to knock Bud back into his grave was a point-blank shot to the head.
Rudy dropped one of his shovels and ran toward the garden, shouting Bud’s name in hope of diverting his attention.
Slipping another cartridge into the shotgun, Mike followed helplessly at his heels. At this point he knew where both shells were going; the uncertainty was whether or not he’d have to break the breach open and load a third for Rudy.
15
Zack Navaro’s small and lifeless body had fallen over Brian’s ch
est and Larry had to drag him away by the ankles to see the full extent of the damage done to his son.
“Oh Jesus…” Larry swore, closing his eyes and wishing the knowledge away. “Oh, my Christ, no…”
Brian lay on his back at the edge of the lawn, his arms splayed out slightly from his sides, as if in supplication or gentle offering.
Take this, my body, and eat of it.
“No,” Larry winced, falling to his knees, the phrase hammering at him so persistently that he had to clench his fists to get it to fade to a tolerable whisper.
A shotgun fired somewhere in the near distance, sending an involuntary twitch along his spine.
Larry opened his eyes again and looked down at his son.
To his surprise, Brian was gazing back at him.
16
Helen reached her husband well ahead of them, hardly aware of the shot Mike fired from the edge of the patio or what it might have told her.
Bud took her eagerly, hauling her into the grave and tearing at her before she even realized she’d fallen. He bit into her breast as a lover might, searching for the shortest route to her heart.
She tasted her own blood and, as the shock set in, wondered if this might be for the best.
She had her husband back.
And he had her.
17
Two more shotgun blasts: the sounds chasing one another across the hills and folds.
In the silence that came afterward, Larry Hanna got to his feet, his eyes fixed on his son. Unlike Helen Iverson, Larry had no illusions or misconceptions about what he was seeing, no fatherly urge to gather Brian into his arms and cry out his thanks to God’s mercy.
Wormwood Page 10
