He took a step back and raised the rifle. It seemed very long and ridiculous in his hands, completely out of proportion to the task and to the room, like a lumberman’s axe in the kitchen to chop celery. Nevertheless, he brought it to bear on the head of the blanket, closed his eyes, and quickly pulled the trigger.
The report was deafening within the walls of the nursery, so much so that it startled Rudy into opening his eyes, almost against his will.
The blanket had been thrown to the far side of the crib, a rusty stain slowly spreading through its folds, poisoning the elephants. The stain dripped down the wall behind the crib as well; its flow thicker there, more essential.
Rudy stood in the blue nursery listening to the raspy caw of a crow beyond the flat space of the windowpane. He stood with the rifle in his hands and stared at the blanket for a long time, waiting for the elephants to move, to march, to wave their rubbery trunks.
Nothing happened.
He exhaled loudly, not even aware he’d been holding his breath. That he’d been holding it ever since he pulled the trigger.
The baby was dead. It was with its family.
Rudy knew that he could never come back to this room, that he would have to carry it away with him.
Elephants and all.
21
Mike heard the gunshot as he was crossing the street to his own house. He paused a moment to look back, but the Navaro’s looked the same as it always had. Gazing at it from fifty feet away, he couldn’t have guessed at the horrors inside.
He supposed it was like that all over — rows of nice, ordinary houses filled up to the ceiling with nightmares, each its own quiet tragedy; each its own private hell.
He glanced briefly at the Sturling’s — the front door still standing open — and continued across the street, stepping onto his lawn and wading in far enough to ask his wife and son how they were doing.
“We’re fine,” Pam answered, though she too, like Rudy, thought “fine” was a long way from the truth. She had an awful feeling, almost a certainty, that Helen Iverson was dead. She’d seen her walking back to her own house from the Cheng’s after the excitement at the end of the street had died down, but hadn’t seen her since. Scared, she’d climbed up on the roof with her son, and though she’d heard a volley of gunshots as she made her way up the ladder, Shane claimed he hadn’t seen anything. She wanted to ask Mike about it, and the shot they’d just heard from the Navaro’s, but she thought those questions could wait until later, when they were face to face and not shouting down from the rooftop for everyone to hear.
Her husband seemed to recognize this in her expression, in the crisscross posture of her arms and legs.
“We’re missing one of the Navaro boys,” he told them, creased eyes squinting against the sun. “The four-year-old; Rudy says his name is Zack.” He paused a beat. “Have either of you seen him?”
“No,” Shane replied, looking like a dead spirit perched atop the roof, his rifle at a restful slant between his legs. “But there were some shots that sounded like they came from behind the Hanna’s.”
Mike looked across the cul-de-sac. So Rudy was right, he thought to himself, frowning. He looked back at Shane. “How many?”
“Two or three, I think.” He shrugged. “They weren’t very loud.”
Mike sighed, troubled by this. “Probably Larry shooting at something out his back window,” he decided, imagining something wandering down from the hilltop. Zack Navaro flickered briefly across his mind. “Keep an eye out that way,” he told them. Their heads lifted toward something behind him and he turned to see Rudy emerging from the Navaro’s, a bundled blanket swinging from his hand. The three of them watched as he approached the piles of carrion at the end of the street and dropped the bloodstained bundle into the arms of its mother. He stared at it for a moment, as if undecided whether or not to leave it, then he looked up and saw them watching.
His head tilted toward the Sturling’s and Mike nodded.
“We need to look in on Keith and Naomi,” Mike told Pam. “You two stay right where you are. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Michael, be careful,” Pam warned.
He smiled then started walking. He was almost to the street when Shane called out to him.
“Mrs. Sturling… she didn’t look very well.” He hesitated, looking even grimmer. “I don’t think she made it.”
Mike nodded. “I’ll be careful,” he promised.
22
He met up with Rudy at the curb and the two of them followed the blood trail into the house. There was a surprising amount to follow, especially once they left the lawn. Inside the Sturling’s living room, they found themselves standing on an oatmeal-colored carpet, its knap thick and luxurious, with flecks of blue and brown sprinkled in to help hide the dirt and give it texture. The loss of blood was nothing less than shocking against it, as if it had come off a roller, deep red and on clearance all day. The smell alone was overwhelming.
The two men glanced uneasily at one another, knowing the only thing they’d find at the end of such a trail would be a corpse, which of course might or might not still be there.
Without a word, they checked their guns before proceeding.
Beneath the blood the house smelled stale, like a cardboard box left out in the sun. It was dark, boarded up. A faint fan of light fell against the kitchen floor, but the blood didn’t go anywhere near it; instead it veered down the hall, toward a bedroom or the bath, through nothing but gloom.
“Keith?” Mike’s shotgun swung over the back of the sofa. “Naomi?”
They listened but nothing moved, no one answered, though the dark itself seemed to grin back at them.
Rudy found himself wishing he’d brought a pistol, something that was easier to wield within the close confines of a house. Pistols, however, were in short supply and he’d left one of the ones they’d taken at 7-Eleven with Aimee. Another thing they forgotten was a flashlight. Over at the Navaro’s they hadn’t needed one because there was only a thin gauze of curtain over the windows, not ¾-inch plywood. The Navaros had bowed out of the game before the reinforcements had gone up. Here though, at the Sturling’s, there was only a small peninsula of light with a sea of darkness pressing around them. Another step and they’d be wading in it; two more and they’d be drowning.
Fortunately, a solution presented itself. Since the power had gone out, most everyone had taken to keeping flashlights or candles within easy reach, and the Sturling’s were no exception. There was a small penlight just inside the door, on a table that had once collected bills and car keys and sunglasses. It lay there like an unspoken invitation.
Come on in.
Mike picked it up and juggled his shotgun to get it working. A thin yellow beam appeared, ending on the ceiling as a fluid ellipse. He pointed it down the hall. The blood scraped the wall then hooked into a darkened doorway.
“Keith?” Mike shouted. “Naomi?”
The grin widened.
“Hello?”
“I don’t like this,” Mike said unhappily, his voice directed at Rudy now, as if his neighbor could somehow absolve him. Wave his hand and pronounce him free from any further responsibility. “He should have answered.”
Rudy agreed. They stood fast on their lighted peninsula, escape just a step away.
“Any plans or suggestions?” Mike wondered.
Rudy admitted that nothing came to mind, except the most obvious: follow the blood.
Mike frowned. “I was afraid of that.” He studied the darkened hall and sighed. “I told Pam I’d be careful.”
“Oh yes,” Rudy agreed. “Most definitely.”
The two of them inched forward, guns out.
Trying not to step on the trail.
23
The first bedroom they came to was a spare, a desk firmly anchored in the far corner. It had likely started out as an office or den and then simply became a receptacle for everything the Sturlings couldn’t bring themselves to throw away. A
treadmill buried under a fall of winter clothes, a bookcase loaded with old videotapes and computer programs. A sewing machine surrounded by shoeboxes and magazines.
A thin layer of dust lay over the hard surfaces, as if the room had already been abandoned or was in the process of becoming a museum display, a place tourists would visit but find too dull to photograph. The flashlight swept the corners and poked about underneath the desk, but quickly decided there was little else to see. The room was unoccupied.
The blood led as far as the next doorway, then became a sticky pool on the bathroom floor, which Mike entered hesitantly in his bare feet. Here they found Naomi, jammed limply in a corner by the tub with her eyes staring up at them, as if the last thing she’d seen had been standing just where they were. Her pretty blonde hair was in bloody tangles.
A step or two further and they saw the bullethole, then the dark splash of brain matter sticking to the wall behind her.
“Shit, she’s dead,” Mike whispered, his voice a sharp hiss as the flashlight veered away, looking for Keith now.
“Wait a minute,” Rudy said, pointing toward the sink. “What’s that?”
Mike turned and bounced the light off the mirror, illuminating a towel bar on the opposite wall whose neat arrangement stood in gross counterpoint to the blood and chaos that had chewed up the rest of the room. Mike gazed at its reflection with a mixture of longing and fascination, as if the overlay of washcloths on towels were already a lost art. A fossilized piece of the past deemed useless and hastily buried while they were busy shooting their neighbors.
“A little higher,” Rudy nudged and Mike raised the beam another foot, wondering what else would become quietly obsolete in the devastating wake of Wormwood.
He saw what Rudy was looking at and frowned. “What is that, a bullet hole?”
A second splash of blood on the mirror — like an isolated island, well away from Naomi, — and a sharp chip along the beveled edge, punctuated by a black period. It seemed to speak for itself. When Mike focused the flashlight on the stain, the room took on a pinkish tinge. He glanced down at Naomi, certain her eyes had shifted with the light, and looked back at the mirror.
Rudy’s reflection looked deeply worried.
“What are you thinking?” Mike asked, afraid he already knew the answer. The blood on the floor was beginning to creep him out. He was afraid to move for fear he’d step in it.
Rudy’s eyes met his in the mirror. “I’m thinking that it would be difficult for a man to miss his target in a room like this, especially a trained soldier.”
“You’re afraid he tried to kill himself,” Mike said numbly, his heart thumping sickly in his chest.
Rudy nodded. “I’m afraid he may have succeeded.”
“If he shot himself, where’s the body?”
Rudy hesitated. “He may not have been as successful as he would have liked.”
Mike uttered a bleak, harsh-sounding laugh and glanced down at Naomi, thinking now there was a success story. He had to bite his lip to keep from falling into the insanity of it. Pretty soon they’d be tallying up the dead in strikes and spares, just like in bowling.
He turned the flashlight at the door, no longer interested in the bathroom but what may have staggered out into the dark. “I think we ought to rethink this,” he said, the shotgun trembling behind the beam, ready to blast anything that appeared in the doorway. “Go back outside and pry some of these boards off the windows.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Rudy agreed, though neither of them moved. Since stepping into the bathroom, a fearful paralysis had settled over them, stiffening their joints and making it difficult to leave. The small room, awful as it was, was safe so long as they had their guns. There was only the one door to defend, whereas if they stepped back into the hall they’d be vulnerable again.
“Do you want me to lead the way?” Rudy volunteered.
Yes, Mike wanted to say. Yes I do. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Rudy had already taken over for him in a moment of weakness in the Navaro’s nursery; he couldn’t very well do that to him again; besides, he didn’t want to give up the penlight.
“No,” Mike replied, forcing himself forward. “I’ll do it.” He stepped carefully over a puddle of blood and paused at the threshold, pointing the beam first left and then right. The house looked as empty as when they’d entered.
Goddamnit Keith, where are you?
Leaving Naomi and the bathroom, they crept past the spare room with its museum stillness and its thin layer of dust. Mike led the way, hugging the clean right wall with his shotgun pointed ahead, hip to hip with Rudy who was covering the dark places behind them. They moved slowly, like a four-legged beast, well-armed and dangerous if surprised.
Which was just what happened — four paces into the living room Keith came gliding out of the woodwork, covered with blood and grim as Death. Mike shrieked, jerked the shotgun at the nightmarish apparition and the thing went off, sending a flickering tongue of flame across the room. Keith (if he’d ever really been there) dropped instantly from sight, like a paper bag swatted from a darkened stage.
In the ringing silence that followed, Mike was not only certain Keith had been there, but that a look of surprise had crossed his face.
Surprise being a human reaction…
Which, if so, might just make him a murderer.
24
Huddled within the concrete walls of the bomb shelter, the Hannas could no longer hear the gunshots echoing off the walls from house to house. Larry had come back down the stairs, set aside his rifle and the spare box of ammunition, and with a bitter look of finality on his face, wrestled the door shut, locking them in.
“Where’s Brian?” Jan asked, only now growing concerned, apparently under the impression that Larry had gone out to rescue him. That, like Mark, he’d been hiding in the juniper bushes when Quail Street began to fall apart. Her concern quickly blossomed into panic when she looked into her husband’s eyes.
“Larry? What did you do with Brian?”
He looked at her flatly and said, “Brian’s dead.”
“Zack ate Brian,” Mark said hollowly, then shuddered against her breast.
The panic receded and a look of confusion took its place. Jan opened her mouth as if to smile, to tell them that it wasn’t a very funny joke, then shut her mouth uncertainly, glancing between Larry and the dark steel panel of the door.
“What do you mean, he’s dead?”
Larry Hanna looked hard at his wife, as if only now realizing that he’d locked himself in with a tiger, one that was just now starting to sharpen her claws. “I mean we lost him,” he told her, trying to keep his voice low and under control. “He came down with Wormwood and I had to put him down.”
Now the smile came out, hideous in the harsh white glow of the battery-powered lantern.
“Larry. Don’t be ridiculous. Open the door and let me see my baby.”
“Jan,” he said softly. “Brian is…” Dead, he meant to tell her, but something in her eyes stopped him: a glimmer far back that warned he’d said enough, that she knew he was dead. Knew it as well as he did, but wouldn’t accept it. It wasn’t stubbornness, it wasn’t a mistake… she’d seen what was on the other side of the basement door and had spent the time he was upstairs erasing it. Sketching something else in Brian’s place. Otherwise, she would have been at the shelter door, opening it herself.
In that moment, Larry understood an unhappy truth: that he could clutch his family close to him, but he couldn’t save them. The fires of Hell and damnation were burning all around them, inside the reinforced shelter as well as Philadelphia or Chicago. He’d been a fool to believe otherwise.
He realized that he didn’t want to die this way.
He didn’t want to die like Brian either, but here, cowering in the ground, it was somehow worse, as if they were already dead. And when he tried to imagine the possible outcomes, all he could see was one subtracted from three then subtracted once again fro
m two, leaving him locked away with a rifle that would turn suicide into an unpredictable gambit. Further on, he saw his skin turning sallow and gray as death finally overwhelmed him, sealing him inside this artificial tomb, no longer able to understand the complicated latchings of the door. Reduced to a ceaseless and pathetic scratching…
Which no one would ever hear, much less answer.
Larry shuddered. He gazed across the vault at his wife and son.
No, he finally decided, this was no way to die.
25
“Mike! Be careful!” Rudy cried, but in the time it took to shout the warning, it was already too late. Mike was kneeling down behind the low screen of the sofa, convinced he’d shot Keith dead. Rudy allowed that it might be true, but lowering one’s defenses within arm’s reach of an unconfirmed kill seemed a terrible lapse in judgment, almost as if he were giving up his own life in contrition.
Swearing under his breath, Rudy stepped around the cluttered plain of the coffee table and pointed his rifle at the prostrate form on the carpet, trying to get Mike out of his line of fire while keeping a bead on the pale smear of Keith’s head.
“Christ!” Mike moaned. “I killed him!” His shotgun clattered to the floor near his knee as he brought the penlight to bear on Keith’s face, his free hand reaching to feel for a pulse along his neck. Rudy shouted for him to back away, at the same time taking a step forward himself, bracing for the worst.
In the shifting pool of light, Keith looked like something that had been hauled off a smoking battlefield. There was a scattershot pattern of shotgun pellets across his right shoulder, his neck and upper chest, but he looked like he’d been in pretty bad shape before Mike even pulled the trigger; before they ever set foot in the house, in fact. A ragged flap of scalp hung like a loose pocket above his right temple, powderburned and accompanied by a devastating head wound. Also a deep gouge had been taken out of his chest, just above his heart, this one looking suspiciously like a bite mark.
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