Shane shook his head. “I hadn’t thought about it.” A silence passed between them. “The manager’s office, maybe?”
Larry nodded. “It’s worth a look, though the manager might be using it himself.”
“We could try to make it home,” Shane suggested, “then look for an empty house if we don’t make it. Or lock ourselves inside a car.
Larry agreed that they could, though the idea of sleeping inside a car — protected by nothing but glass — did not appeal to him. “I guess it’ll depend on what we find down the road,” he said, rising to his feet, his ration of food consumed. “Or what we don’t find.”
Shane threw his small harvest of grass to the wind and rose also, anxious to cover the last few miles.
The two of them stood gazing downriver.
“I’ll tell you one thing though,” Larry said, frowning, his eyes following another body as it drifted past. “I’m through drinking out of faucets and taps as of right now.”
27
Autumn Creek Road took them without trouble or complaint to within a stone’s throw of their destination. Here, the river swayed back toward the highway and some enterprising young developer had come up with the brilliant idea of laying out a trailer park with the somewhat grandiose name of “Riverview Court”. It wasn’t especially large — no more than 25 or 30 units, dropped down like jackstraws, without regard for aesthetics or privacy, on a wedge of land not much bigger than Quail Street — but it was active. Like a hill of ants after their mound has been doused with gasoline.
Studying it from the cover of an apple orchard in brilliant bloom, Larry and Shane heard a volley of gunshots and then a man stumbled out between the decorative pillars of the entrance; a man who’d suddenly found himself very much on fire. An infected mob came charging out of Riverview Court, knocking the flaming man down and tearing him to pieces.
“This might be a little tricky,” Larry decided. He and Shane turned away, huddling down in the grass to plan their strategy.
“We can get by them on the bike, no problem,” Larry said, “but how do we keep them from following us into the parking lot?”
Shane surveyed the curved stretch of road. There was a small vacant lot, deep and overgrown, between the orchard and the trailer park, but other than that, they had very little room to negotiate — the base of the hillside, eroded by past floods, cut sharply against the south shoulder of the road.
“There’s a wall all the way around the trailer park,” Shane noticed. “Maybe we could go around the backside while they’re busy here in front?”
Larry nodded. “Aside from crossing back over the highway, I think that’s our only option.” He followed the cinderblock wall with his eyes until it ended at a right angle. “I wonder what’s back there…”
“It used to be an orchard,” Shane reminded him. “Before they could start building they had to pull out all the trees. I remember driving by with my mom and dad and the orchard was suddenly gone, and there was this huge pile of dead limbs and stumps right in the middle.”
“That’s right,” Larry murmured. In fact, the whole area had been orchard just a few years ago, before they’d put in the Columbia Avenue exit; that was why there were so few people around. There were a few old warehouses, and some light industrial parks east of Columbia, but the trailer park and the commercial properties (including Fred Meyer) were all very recent additions.
Larry studied the small mob in front of the gate and decided they’d better make their move sooner instead of later. He glanced at Shane. “Maybe we should walk the bike through with the engine at a low idle, so we can keep the noise at a minimum, but still hop back on if we get into trouble?”
Shane thought about this and suggested another approach.
“We’re close enough now that we could just walk in, couldn’t we?”
The Yamaha was leaning against a tree a few rows back. Larry had cut the engine and coasted into the apple orchard when they’d seen all the activity around the trailer park. Now he glanced back at it, frowning. “You mean just leave the bike here?”
“Why not? It won’t do us much good between here and the parking lot, and it seems to me there’s a chain-link fence or something around the back anyway.” He shrugged. “Even if there isn’t, if we leave it here we won’t have to worry about anyone stealing it once we’re inside.”
Larry gazed across the vacant field, rubbing the color from his lips. It was plain from his expression that he didn’t want to part with the cycle, but in the end he allowed it might be more of a hindrance than a help to them. And it would be safer in the orchard; he hadn’t thought of that.
“All right, we’ll do it your way.” He pulled his revolver from its holster. “Got your guns ready?”
Shane smiled, showing him the 9mm and the shotgun, both fully loaded from their stop at the bridge.
Larry glanced at their makeshift saddlebags. “We’ll have to untie the backpacks.”
“Maybe we should leave one of them with the bike,” Shane suggested, “with some food and ammo… just in case?”
“All right,” Larry nodded wearily. He turned toward the distant beige wall, the top of Fred Meyer rising over the trailer park, at least 150 yards away. He sighed. “What if the place is overrun, like Summertides?”
“I don’t know,” Shane replied. “I guess we turn back and try to think of something else.”
Larry uttered a bitter chuckle. “There is nothing else. This is the last stop on our list.”
“There’s the medical offices further up Columbia,” Shane reminded him.
Larry shook his head. “Kid, I wish I had your optimism.”
“It’s not optimism,” Shane told him. “It’s desperation.”
“Fair enough,” Larry shrugged. “I wish I had your desperation.”
28
They broke cover well back from the pillared gate of the trailer park and the black strip of Autumn Park Road, crossing the vacant field hunched over like soldiers, their guns at the ready. No one seemed to notice them, and they made it to the cinderblocks surrounding Riverview Court without incident. Continuing on, they followed the back of the property line through tangles of weeds and overgrown grass: all that was left of the orchard which had once flourished there. Muffled sounds issued over the wall: a dull, almost mournful moaning, the senseless shuffle of sandpaper feet; and once, the chilling sound of a baby crying, lost somewhere inside the courtyard.
Shane and Larry glanced uneasily at one another and then moved on.
A breach became apparent in the wall, a break in the gray monotony blocked by a barred security gate. As they approached it a gut-twisting stench enveloped them, buzzing with flies.
Amid the tall weeds and sage, they found themselves wading through a litter of human remains, bodies chopped into pieces or set on fire. Things that were dead beyond question, dumped unceremoniously beyond the court’s perimeter for the scavengers to carry away.
The cloud of flies settled about them as Shane and Larry paused to peer through the steel bars of the gate.
The flanks of three separate trailers presented themselves, each set at a different angle, as if conspiring to block their view of the inner courtyard (or to hide the gate from those trapped inside), unremarkable except for a single bloody handprint slipping, weak-kneed, down a length of weatherproof siding.
As they stood gazing a shadow appeared, its shoulders stooped and its head drawn to an exaggerated point. It shambled up the side of the furthest trailer then hesitated, turning its head this way and that, moaning with a grim sort of longing, as if sensing them near.
Then with a gassy sigh it sank away, defeated.
Shane heard something whisper in the dry weeds behind him and turned, the shotgun barely in check, startling both Larry and the flies.
No one was there, not even a shadow, just an awful smell and pieces of flesh that had once been human.
They broke away from the gate without bothering to investigate any further.<
br />
29
A chain-link fence stood at the edge of the parking lot, filled with privacy slats which sliced their view of the store into narrow pinstripes. Gaps they had to move their heads from side to side to see through. What they saw was encouraging: the parking lot was all but empty. There were a few cars scattered about, their windshields smashed or parked at odd angles, but for the most part the superstore looked wonderfully approachable.
“What do you think?” Shane asked, his mind already made up.
“I think it’s better than we could have hoped for,” Larry decided, squinting through the links. “I see a few dead ones wandering around by the lawn and garden area, but it’s a long way from Summertides.”
Shane turned his head and several new figures came into view; half a dozen he’d somehow missed before. The slats in the fence had a tendency to play tricks like that, hiding and revealing like those magic motion baseball cards. Look at it one way and the batter’s in his stance; turn it another and watch him swing.
A woman in a torn blouse was pushing an empty shopping cart through a bed of marigolds; two or three teenaged boys were bumping clumsily against the door to home electronics; a balding man in a hunting vest was standing stock-still beside a teal SUV, staring into the window as if he’d just locked his keys inside, the remains of his left arm hanging from his vest like an empty sausage casing.
“Which way do you want to go?” Larry asked. “Home Electronics or Lawn and Garden? Home Electronics is a little further, but it looks clear to me.”
“I don’t think so,” Shane said doubtfully. “I just saw some kids by that big pillar.”
“Oh, yeah…” Larry nodded. “I see them now.”
“Which one’s closer to the pharmacy?” Shane asked.
Larry thought back to the two or three times he’d actually been inside and shrugged. “They’re both about the same, I guess; or rather, neither one. The pharmacy counter’s all the way in back.”
“Let’s take Lawn and Garden then,” Shane decided, picturing racks of hammers, shovels and axes just inside, which were bound to come in handier than CDs and digital cameras. He explained this rationale briefly to Larry.
“Good thinking,” Larry agreed, tucking his revolver back in its holster for the vault over the fence.
By the time he’d done this, Shane had dropped over the other side.
30
Ideally, they would cover the 60 or 70 yards to the entrance as quickly and as quietly as possible, without firing their guns or causing a lot of fuss that would attract unwanted attention. Unfortunately, the fact that the parking lot was nearly empty worked against them; there was no cover to screen their movement, which left them out in the middle of a flat black desert, with nothing but blind luck to watch over their progress.
The first twenty or so yards went beautifully, exactly according to plan…
Then Shane heard something that sounded stealthily like a car door opening — metal letting go of metal — and the next thing he knew a woman in a white blouse and denim shorts was charging their left flank, sobbing as her shoes slapped the asphalt.
Their guns swung up automatically, ready to cut her down before she got within twenty feet of them. To their great surprise, however, she stopped short and threw up her hands.
“Oh God, don’t shoot me!” she cried, her voice skipping like a stone across the parking lot, turning every head. “Please don’t shoot me! I’ve been trapped here for hours!”
Behind her, the door to the SUV was standing open, the one-armed man in the hunting vest no longer interested in its shaded interior. He was shambling after her, his gait slow and unbalanced, as if he hadn’t gotten used to the loss of his arm yet. The sounds coming out of his mouth spoke of a great need, of hours of patiently waiting for his quarry to be flushed out of hiding.
From all corners of the parking lot, his cry was taken up by others, all just as urgent, all just as needy. They began to draw in a tightening noose around the trio in the northwest corner.
The woman looked around in bleak desperation, terrified to find herself so exposed after hours of hunkering down in her minivan. She took a halting step toward the two men holding guns.
“For God’s sake, take me with you!” she pleaded, ready to turn back and lock herself in the SUV if they refused or maintained their silence. “Please, I’ll give you anything I’ve got, but don’t leave me!”
Shane nodded and she ran at them, sobbing with relief, her approach like a battering ram — a woman in her mid to late twenties, heavy in the hips and bust.
Possibly attractive, were her face not so distorted with fear.
“Get behind us!” Larry shouted, stepping out of her way before she knocked him down. “We’re going into the store! If you’re coming, stay close and keep your head down!”
“Thank-you!” she cried, choking on the ragged ends of her emotions, repeating the phrase over and over as if it were a kind of mantra to her, a delicate bubble of gratitude in which she somehow felt safe.
Shane felt her fingertips come to rest lightly on his back, as if she were assuring herself that the two of them were real, or else unwilling to let him stray out of arm’s reach. Her sobs were like a hot locomotive bearing down just behind him.
“All right, let’s go while we’ve still got some running room,” Larry growled, and the three of them ran toward the shaded entrance to Lawn and Garden. Two figures loomed in their path: a middle-aged woman who folded with a dull grunt beneath the butt of Shane’s shotgun and a man in a brown Fred Meyer apron with a savage shotgun wound festering in the hollow of his belly. He was more persistent than the woman and Larry put him down with the business end of his revolver.
The man fell amid the withering petals of his petunias and geraniums and troubled them no more. There were, however, others to take his place: long shadows staggering around the corners of the building, each one a walking horror. More than they had bullets enough to fix.
And the doors, of course, once they got there, stubbornly refused them entrance. Locked, or left without power; prying them apart would take valuable time, yet to outright smash their way inside would be an invitation for all to follow.
Larry swore and pounded the reinforced glass with his fist. He estimated they had ammunition to survive another four, maybe five minutes. “Look for something to pry these damn things apart!” he shouted, surprised at the heat, the raw desperation behind the command. He had thought that part of him dead, pruned away with his wife and sons, but it seemed that there was life in him yet, or simply an unwillingness to fall amid the stacks of manure and potting soil. It was no place for a man to die, to spend an uncertain eternity wandering about.
One of the teenagers from the north entrance came prowling around the corner, his gait light and unaffected, like the blonde boy Shane had tangled with on the other side of the river. He came running at them so fast that Larry wondered if he was infected at all. From what he could see, there wasn’t a mark on his body; just an odd lilt to the left side of his head, as if he’d fallen asleep with a head full of styling gel and his curly brown hair had flattened against the pillow.
The blonde woman from the SUV screamed when she saw him. A short, shrill blast that took flight across the parking lot, hit the cinderblocks surrounding the trailer park, and squawked back at them. Without a gun or a club, she picked up a good-sized clay pot and flung it at him. It was a lucky throw (or else she was experienced in tossing them), striking him squarely on the knee and knocking his leg out from under him as he stumbled to within 5 or 6 feet of them. While he was down, she snatched up another and brought it down on his head with the strength of both arms.
Larry winched at the dull crunch that accompanied the demise of the pot, which left the kid’s head looking as flat on top as a broken plate. The boy looked up at her — almost a reflex, Larry thought, raising his gun– but the woman picked up another pot.
“Will this work?” Shane wondered, the sound of clay shatteri
ng as Larry turned to regard the proffered head of a garden hoe. A brightly-painted blade on a varnished length of ash.
Larry assumed he meant as a weapon, nodded his head vaguely then remembered the door.
“Go ahead and try it,” he shouted, then fired his revolver at a black man who looked like he’d spent the past two weeks suffocating under a hot front porch. His skin was mottled and blue, the flesh beneath swollen too tight for him to wear. Like a balloon man, all the creases of a man approaching forty had been erased and distended, and when the bullet struck there was a sound like gas escaping from a torn bladder.
Shane set his shotgun across an open flat of seed packets and went to work on the crack between the doors, the sound bright and torturous, like a giant bird in its death throes.
The black man tried to crawl to his feet and received a clay crown for all his effort. He farted one last time beneath the impact and then lay still, as if the gas had been the only thing keeping him going. A nauseating stench, like mounds of dead chickens, drifted over them and Larry began to retch, only barely keeping the meal he’d eaten at the bridge down. He turned to see if Shane was making any progress on the doors.
“Why don’t you just break it?” the woman shrieked, a dark splash of blood soiling her blouse. She picked up the last pot on display as if to do just that.
“Don’t!” Larry shouted, holding out an arm like a policeman halting traffic. “If you break it they’ll come in after us!”
“They’re already in!” she contended, still brandishing the pot. “My husband smashed one of the doors in front and I saw some of them follow him in!”
At this, Shane ceased his exertions with the hoe and looked questioningly at Larry.
“Great,” Larry murmured, his shadow deflating against the wall. “That’s just great.” He looked at the woman as if she were somehow responsible. A turn of bad luck they had unwittingly taken in. “Which door did he break?”
Wormwood Page 19
