He knew his son was in Hell.
He knew it was Wormwood (and not Brian) crawling slowly across the lawn because he’d seen the same feverish glow in Zack’s eyes. The same terrible vacancy, burning to be filled, as if Larry had something it thought it could swallow despite the ragged hole in its throat.
Larry raised the rifle, remembered he’d fired his only bullet, and quickly reversed his grip, bringing the butt forward to use if he had to.
Brian continued his awful crawl, his head lolling listlessly, like a sunflower on a dandelion stalk, but his eyes never wavered. He gazed at his father through bruised lids and bloody lashes. Larry took a cursory swing with the gun but the thing in his son’s body didn’t even flinch, it just kept right on coming. After two more fruitless feints, Larry found himself backed up against the side of the house. He banged on the basement door with the flat of his palm, shouting for Jan to open up.
Brian came closer. Very soon, Larry realized, he was going to have to make the terrible choice of braining his son or dying with him. It was all well and good to tell himself it wasn’t really Brian; that it was the damned disease using his body, but that was an awful hard pill to swallow, even with his throat in tatters and his eyes the way they were.
“Damn it, Jan!” he screamed, pounding with his fist now. “Open up this fucking door!”
With Brian a few feet away and closing, Larry heard a frantic struggle erupt on the other side of the reinforced panel: his wife screaming at Mark to open it, for God’s sake open the door and let his father in, while the two of them fought for the handle. Larry heard his eldest son shout that they were all dead, that Zack Navaro had eaten Dad and Brian and now he wanted to come inside and eat them as well.
And while this argument played itself out, time ran out on Larry’s side of the door. Brian’s dead fingers clutched at his father’s shoe like the probing feelers of an enormous insect, slipping off the worn leather and clutching again. Larry kicked them away, but Brian was persistent. The fingers returned and Larry brought the butt of the rifle down, snapping the small bones in his son’s hand until Brian could no longer use it, until it looked like a tarantula which has come across the losing side of a boot. Yet Brian bore this with silent determination: inching closer, ever closer, until Larry aimed higher and swung harder and broke his son’s collarbone with a sickening crunch.
At the same time, Jan won control of the doorknob and Larry suddenly found himself falling through darkness. He hit the thin pad of the basement carpet and galaxies erupted against the dim gray tiles overhead, threatening to swallow him whole. At the same instant, the rifle bounced out of his grasp, his wife pressed her hands to her face and screamed, and Larry felt the painful rake of the door against the meat of his calf as Mark sprang out of the shadows and forced it shut.
He sat up in darkness, the starlight fading, reaching for his gun, certain that Brian had crawled inside, but the rifle was yanked painfully out of his grasp. In the uncertain gloom, he imagined that Mark was pointing it at his head.
“No!” Jan shrieked, brushing past Larry as the rifle clattered to the floor again, though not before he heard a hard, dry click.
Sobbing, Mark collapsed into his mother’s outstretched arms.
And beneath the sound of their weeping, Larry heard the blind grope of broken fingers at the base of the door.
18
Mike nudged the two bodies back into the earth and tried not to linger on the sight: the desperate tangle of limbs, the shocking wounds, the heads that were no longer much like heads, but clay urns that had cracked under the pressure of a violent fermentation.
He was tempted to throw a blanket of dirt over them, if not bury them completely, but he knew they had more pressing matters to attend to. The dead; these dead, at least, could wait.
“Did you hear a gunshot?” Rudy asked, sniffing as if a whiff of spent powder had just drifted past. The problem was that the whole day reeked of gunpowder. It was tangled in their hair, caught in their clothes, and embedded in the moist tissue of their sinuses.
Mike shrugged. “I’ve been hearing shots echo off the hills all day.”
“This wasn’t an echo. It was closer.” He looked over Mike’s shoulder. “It almost sounded like it came from the Hanna’s.”
Mike made a face. “I doubt that. Larry’s been shut up inside his house since we buried Bud.” At the mention of his former neighbor, Mike felt the presence of the grave again, the raw scattering of soil beneath his feet. He wanted to get away from the Iverson’s garden because he didn’t like the way his eyes kept pulling toward it, lighting on Bud and Helen like nervous flies, waiting for one of them to stir.
But Rudy was reluctant to let the gunshot go. His gaze remained on a gray slice of the Hanna’s, which was all they could see from where they stood.
“Look,” Mike argued, feeling jittery and impatient, “we have more pressing concerns to deal with at the moment. Let’s finish what we started before we go knocking on doors, asking for more. All right?”
He broke open his shotgun, extracted the empty shells, then felt in his pockets for more. He came up with two, but that was all. He plugged them into the barrels and snapped the breach shut. “Besides,” he grumbled, “Larry’s been taking care of himself pretty good so far. I sure as hell didn’t see him running out in his bare feet to save your ass.”
Rudy opened his mouth to protest, to somehow defend Larry’s actions; in the end, however, he simply nodded. Mike was right: the Iversons had been a tragic diversion, but they still had unfinished business awaiting them. When that was done, he would go check on the Hannas; by himself, if necessary.
He realized he still had the shovel in hand. It seemed almost a part of him now: a long and rusty tooth that had hacked off heads and punched in faces. A shiver passed through him at the memory and he felt no regret exchanging it for the rifle; a more refined tool that would keep death more than an arm’s length away.
He checked the clip and the safety. It was just as he’d left it.
With a nod, they moved toward the thick green hedge that separated the Iverson’s from the Navaro’s.
19
Eventually, as their sobs subsided, the others heard it too: the dry scratch of Brian’s fingers against the basement door. To Larry, who’d been aware of it all along, it almost sounded like tree branches bobbing in the wind, mindless and eternal, as if they could go on tapping until there was nothing left but a small white skeleton reaching beneath the eaves.
“What is that?” Jan wondered, raising her head from Mark’s and tilting it toward the door.
Larry wondered how she could ask such a thing. Surely she had seen what had become of Brian when the door flew open? He remembered her screaming, but perhaps that had just been surprise at his tumble. At any rate, Mark had been pretty damn quick to slam it shut again, so maybe she hadn’t.
Still, she ought to be asking about Brian… wondering where he was.
In the dim light that shone down the stairs, he studied her face. There was an expression there (or perhaps a lack of one) he didn’t recognize, as if she were paging through a book written in a foreign language.
Maybe she had seen and was in a state of shock, or denial?
Larry?” she said, her face an open question mark, troubled by the way he was looking at her.
“Never mind,” he said, picking up his rifle and grunting to his feet. There was a small, egg-shaped knot on the back of his head, tender to the touch. It shot off pinwheels and sparklers in the gloom of the basement and made his head ache with its own dull pulse. Grimacing, he waited for these things to fade, then beckoned to his wife and son. “Come on,” he said. “Come wait in the shelter while I have a look around.”
They went without argument, like grateful sleepwalkers.
The bomb shelter was a small and unglamorous hollow of reinforced concrete directly off the L-shaped turn in the stairs. The interior had been painted a solid shade of aquamarine, as if studies at the time
had proved beyond a doubt that this was the most tranquil, the most soothing shade in the spectrum. Currently, it looked like moving day, with small comforts and essentials piled in boxes and shoved against the walls. Larry’s eye happened to fall on a small stuffed animal, a dark brown bulldog that Brian had brought down, and suddenly the shelter seemed trite and meaningless, its purpose already a failure.
He reeled his gaze back in and closed the door, assuring them he’d be right back.
Rifle in hand, he climbed the remaining stairs.
Most of his spare ammunition was down with Jan and Mark, but he’d left a box high on the upstairs bookcase with a vague idea of sniping. Never in his worst nightmares, however, could he have imagined the purpose he now planned to put it to, but this was what the world had become. As careful and diligent as he’d been, this was what the world had become. He need look no further than his own back door for proof.
Leaning the heavy rifle against the sofa, he took down the box and filled his pockets with a dozen or so shells (keenly reminded of the feeling of being caught without them in the back yard). As he did so, he drifted back to the high picture window and parted the curtains and inch or two, gazing down on Quail Street.
Bodies were laying in bloody rags and pieces, looking like debris that had been dumped from a passing plane. At the far end of the street, they were far enough away to be unidentifiable and Larry had no urge to get his binoculars to bring them any closer, so he simply let his eyes pass on.
The street seemed at something of a lull; no doubt gathering up strength for its next outburst. A glimmer of movement caught his eye across the cul-de-sac and he spotted the Dawley kid leaning against the rough brick backrest of his chimney, looking as pale as a death’s-head beneath his dyed black hair. His mother was beside him — a sleek pistol dangling loosely over her knee — and the two of them were talking, casting occasional glances over their shoulders and along the street.
Larry wondered if they knew what had happened in his back yard, if they were laughing ironically over it, and decided it didn’t matter. The world itself was a laughing black bird that would crow over each of them in turn.
He let the curtain drop and carried the rifle to the kitchen.
The view from the window above the sink was shorter, narrower, but there were still bodies to be found. At the edge of the lawn, half-concealed by the shade of a dying elm, Chase Navaro lay where Larry had dropped him, a preening black raven on each slender shoulder. They squawked and fluttered as he opened the window and punched out the screen with the butt of his rifle, but in the absence of a visible threat, soon swooped back to the boy.
Larry set the gun aside for the moment and climbed awkwardly into the sink, a vantage he’d never enjoyed despite nine years in the house. There was little enough enjoyment to be taken from it now, but a spring breeze took pity on him and sent a cool, caressing hand over his brow, bringing with it the sweet fragrance of cherry blossom and wild honeysuckle.
He angled first the rifle then his right shoulder out the window, his head an uncomfortable fit just behind them.
The blackbirds shifted nervously on Chase’s shoulders. The junipers along the back fence bristled and shivered.
Below him lay his son, his small head (achingly familiar in its swirls and cowlicks) nodding against the ground, as if he hadn’t the strength to hold it up any longer; which, of course, he didn’t. The muscles which might have allowed him to do so were halfway down Chase Navaro’s throat, which in turn would be eaten by ravens.
Mother Nature was a wonderfully efficient and unsentimental old bitch, Larry decided, wincing as the edge of the windowpane dug sharply into his ribs. He let the barrel of the gun list toward the ground as he adjusted his seat on the sill, and then braced the butt of the rifle against his right shoulder. Gripping the barrel as best he could with his left hand, he squinted down the sights.
With a dark twinge of dismay, he realized that all the logistics were in place: God had conspired to make it physically possible — necessary, in fact — for him to shoot his own son. Until that moment, the greater part of him had been silently hoping that it wouldn’t work. That the window would be too narrow or that Brian would be at an angle that was beyond him or that the gun would simply cease to function or fall from his grasp and shudder to the ground. Of course, it was still possible that the rifle wouldn’t fire, but Larry had faith. God had been with him this far, he thought sourly, surely He wouldn’t abandon him now. Larry Hanna had had it much too easy all his life; it was time he started to know humility and suffering, starting with his son.
“Please,” Larry wept, tears in his eyes as he sighted down the barrel, trying to keep it steady, a thousand conflicting emotions batting and tugging at him, ruining his aim.
He pulled the trigger and Brian twitched, a small black stain appearing on his shirt, just below the right shoulder blade. The boy paused, his head no longer shaking, his hand drawing back from the door.
Larry felt a strong urge to duck back inside, as if he’d just dropped a water balloon instead of a bullet and didn’t want his son to know who was playing such a terrible joke on him.
But Brian went back to scratching as if the bullet were only a teasing tap on the shoulder, trying to draw his attention from what lay beyond the door.
Larry exhaled despondently, wiping the sting from his eyes as he retreated far enough to reload the rifle.
God, it seemed, was going to make him get it right.
God was going to make him keep on shooting until he ran out of bullets or until Brian was properly dead.
Larry ejected the spent casing: it bounced along the counter, came to a tentative halt, then rolled in a slow circle off the edge to the kitchen floor. He picked a fresh round from the box. There were, he estimated, at least fifty more tries lined up inside, not counting the dozen or so he had jingling in his pocket. Nor the four or five extra boxes down in the shelter.
Pushing the shell into the breach, he wondered if even God could be that persistent.
It turned out to be a moot point, because his next shot found its mark. He was able to hold the gun steady and the bullet entered Brian’s skull almost dead center, right where the soft spot had been when he was a baby. A time both impossibly distant and impossibly near.
He died with little protest or fanfare, which Larry thought was something of a blessing, considering how he’d died the first time. Considering that, being shot in the head by one’s father was almost like being rocked to sleep.
It was all a question of perspective.
Edging himself down from the sink, Larry decided he’d had enough perspective for one day. He felt a deep need for sleep, to retreat from the world and crawl down inside himself. Down so far he wouldn’t even dream.
There was a name, he knew, for such a place.
A name he’d feared all his life.
But that too, he was discovering, was a matter of perspective.
20
Mike looked gravely at Rudy, all the color gone from his face, replaced with a pale shade of blue imparted from the windowsheers. “I can’t do this,” he said, the look on his face helpless; the desperate pinch of a man about to be sick. “Seriously,” he added.
Rudy nodded, as if to say he understood, that there was no shame in knowing this and admitting it.
The two of them had searched the Navaro house from back to front, finding answers to questions they hadn’t yet asked (most tellingly in the empty bottle of sleeping pills and water glass left out near the bathroom sink), but so far they hadn’t found Zack. He might be in the crawlspace or the attic or, more likely, he may have simply slipped out unobserved. Whatever the case, they found themselves lingering in this blue and cheerless room, transfixed by the one small thread in need of snipping before pressing on.
The Navaros had an infant son; they’d both known that. A boy born to them last fall — late October, it seemed; a very short life…
“Why don’t you wait outside?” Rudy su
ggested, gazing down into the crib where it wriggled like a bloated salamander, bumping its bald head from corner to corner.
“Are you sure?” Mike asked, making a quick study of his face.
Rudy nodded, not sure of anything anymore. Since quitting the Iverson’s back yard, Helen’s face had been following him, haunting him, frozen at the terrible moment Bud had bit into her. Was there really any surprise in her expression? he wondered, or just the grim agony of acceptance, as if she’d been thinking of him just as Rudy had, her own shovel calling from its hook in the garage.
In the end, she’d seen the shotgun coming and had been grateful. After thirty-five years of marriage, taking care of Bud was all she knew.
Rudy guessed the Navaros would want the same, the baby included. He had to force himself to believe that, if only for the next minute or two.
Mike cast a last troubled look into the crib and offered Rudy his shotgun. Rudy shook his head, hefting his own rifle slightly. “This will be fine.”
Fine? Had he said fine? That seemed an extraordinarily bad choice of words. Nothing about this day had been fine. Neater was what he’d meant; the rifle would be neater, less like overkill, though he guessed Mike probably knew that. His neighbor clapped him firmly on the shoulder, either in gratitude or to wish him luck.
Rudy told him to keep an eye out for Zack and Mike murmured something to the affirmative, then his footsteps receded, winding down the hall and passing out the front door. In the murmuring silence that followed, Rudy found himself alone with the baby.
He looked into the crib with a shudder. The boy was staring up at him, its eyes slightly luminescent, like glowing coins. It smacked its mouth as if calling for its bottle, its front teeth barely through its gums.
Rudy set the rifle aside long enough to search through the closet for an extra blanket. Unfolding it, a circus theme appeared. He threw it over the wriggling lump in the crib and a blue ghost with smiling baby elephants took its place. The blanket began to move on its own, like a cheap magic trick, the smacking sound muffled beneath. Muffled, but not fooled. It knew that Rudy was still there.
Wormwood Page 11
