She was just as he’d left her, her face slack, eyes gazing up at the place where he’d been kneeling. Without ceremony or sentiment, he put the point of the shaft against the smooth white curve of her forehead. Gripping it with both hands, he closed his eyes and dropped his weight down sharply, like a man falling through a trapdoor to Hell.
There was a moment of hesitation, a stubborn crack, and the post dropped a few final inches, enough to carry the point deep into the stirring tissue of her brain.
Larry exhaled, a sheen of sweat clinging to his pale brow. When he opened his eyes, Shane was standing over him, splattered with blood, the axe hanging loosely in one hand and the reclaimed penlight in the other. Larry thought he looked about forty years older.
“I tried to stop her,” Shane said, looking into her eyes.
Larry nodded, rising wearily to his feet. “I know you did. I did, too. There was nothing we could do about it.” He pointed his flashlight down the aisle, refusing to look at Rachel’s corpse, knowing that if he did she would haunt him forever. The beam picked up some lumps and scattered limbs; a butcher shop ravaged by dogs. “I’m sorry I wasn’t much help,” he said, bringing the light back to Shane.
The boy shrugged, and then sent a chill down Larry’s spine by admitting: “I might not have known it was you.”
A moan sounded somewhere toward the front of the store. It was answered by another, much closer.
“C’mon,” Larry sighed, swinging his light through the rafters. “Let’s get those drugs and find a place to rest. My back is killing me.”
4
Shane lit a road flare and the area around the pharmacy filled with an eerie pink light. The counter itself (and all the drugs it contained) lay behind a roll-down security gate; one that was locked with a long-gone key. Fortunately, they’d brought along a master.
“Stand back. Get behind me,” Larry directed, unholstering his revolver and pointing it at the lock. He waited until Shane was in position before firing his first round, which missed the lock entirely and drilled a path through a Viagra display.
“Shit,” Larry swore and took a step closer, the muzzle less than a yard from its target now. He tightened his face as if he expected the lock to turn to shrapnel and squeezed the trigger. There was a sound like an aluminum bat striking a brick wall and a corresponding wave which clattered up the gate. The lock itself looked stunned, its face brightly hammered, but it clung tenaciously to its hasp.
“Son of a bitch,” Larry exhaled, his voice dark and impatient. He put the gun a foot closer and the noise was repeated, more solidly this time. As the wave retreated, a line of solid space appeared at the bottom of the gate.
“Ha!” Larry brightened. “We’re in business!”
There was a shuffle behind them. A stack of discount books slipped off a display table and Shane turned to see something which had once carted groceries out to parked cars. A boy no older than himself, dressed in a white shirt and reflectorized vest. He had a Fred Meyer nametag that read “Corpse” in the shifting light of the flare. It looked like he’d been hit by a car, drug through the parking lot, run over one or twice, and then had found his way back inside the store. He looked pleased to find them, as if he’d been searching for quite some time.
“More trouble,” Shane said, the words lost as Larry rolled up the noisy gate.
The two of them ducked underneath and pulled the barricade quickly back down, the weighted edge narrowly missing Shane’s foot.
They found themselves pressed into a space roughly fifteen feet by two, the tall pharmacy counter pressed right against their backs.
Larry laughed softly through the metal latticework, stepping down on the bottom of the gate with his boot. The bagboy — whose name was actually “Court”, Shane saw — hissed like a reptile and extended his arms toward the gate, his fingers working themselves into the gaps, shaking the tightly interwoven links.
Larry made a motion with his head to indicate the space on the other side of the counter. “Why don’t you go ahead and get the things you need,” he suggested, his face still grinning (though Shane couldn’t imagine why). “I’ll stay here and entertain our new friend.”
Shane nodded and sidestepped to an open space of countertop beside the cash register. Jumping up, the heels of his palms planted and his feet kicking up the gate, he was able to get his seat high enough to roll back and tuck his legs over.
His boots touched down on a padded mat and he turned, the pills smiling back at him in neat, unmolested rows.
5
At first Shane thought he’d lost the shopping list; that he’d hooked it out of his pocket by the river or somewhere else along the way: a long list of drugs that all sounded alike, none of which he’d bothered to commit to memory.
He went through his pockets in an escalating panic, certain now it was gone and the whole trip was going to be for nothing; that he’d end up guessing and bring his father home a lifetime supply of estrogen supplements or stool softeners.
Slow down, he told himself, his heart beating frantically as he stood in the dark pocket at the back of the store. Look again, and this time start with the last place you remember it.
That would be his back pocket. He’d stuffed it in his front jeans pocket when his mom had given it to him because he was afraid it might somehow wiggle out of the back on the seat of the motorcycle. Then when they’d left the bike back in the orchard, he’d transferred the list to his back pocket because he didn’t want it getting in the way of his spare ammunition.
He reached into his right back pocket again and there it was, just where he’d left it.
My fingers must have slipped under it the first time, he decided, unfolding the scrap of paper with great care, as if it might take a mind to disappear again.
The spot of his penlight trembled slowly down the list and, squinting, Shane began to speak the names loud enough for Larry to hear.
6
“Van-co-my-cin,” Shane read laboriously, drawing the syllables out until they sounded more like a first-year reading primer than antibiotics. “Kef-lex. Te-quin. A-mox-i-cill-an.”
Larry lifted his head. “You okay back there?” It sounded like the kid was asleep and dreaming in Latin.
Shane murmured words to the affirmative, still in that same slow voice. He began to whisper the syllables again, this time drawing them closer, coming out with distinct words, some of which Larry recognized and some he didn’t.
Court seemed lulled by the sound, as if the words were a far-off melody he’d been rocked to sleep to during his childhood. His blood-scabbed fingers cascaded softly down the gate.
“Morphine, Lidocain, Novocain.” These said with greater certainty.
Larry watched the dead kid’s face: a devastated lump of adolescence a mere eighteen inches from his own. Beneath the damage, there was a tug of expression, a faint recognition… like a dog who hears a word it knows within a distant conversation.
Larry raised his penlight and the glow of Wormwood abated, though Court’s pupils remained the same, neither contracting nor dilating as he moved the light from side to side. There was a smell coming off him like discarded meat trays on a hot day or fruit rotting in the darkness beneath a kitchen sink. A sweet decay.
Court raised his arms again and banged them against the gate, as if prodded by his disease, then calmed again as Larry began to sing, picking up Shane’s whisper as he rummaged through the bottles, turning it into a song.
“Vancomycin, Vancomycin; somebody bring me some Vancomycin.
Vancomycin, Vancomycin; I’ve been searchin’ all the day.”
“What are you doing?” Shane asked, pausing in the middle of a shelf and turning toward the counter.
“Just singing a little song to Court,” Larry answered in a mellow tone, one that reminded Shane of Bob Ross, painter of happy little clouds on public TV.
“Vancomycin, Vancomycin; singin’ to Court ‘bout Vancomycin.
Hey nonny-nonny hey.”
7
A young woman in sandals and a yellow print dress came staggering out of the darkness of the magazine aisle, a hook of dried blood drawn from the corner of her mouth like a hasty comma, black and restless in the flare’s sputtering light. She didn’t come with a nametag pinned to her shapely breast, so Larry christened her “Julia” and began to sing the Beatles’ tune of the same name.
Julia, however, was not moved or placated by the off-key serenade. She let out a breathless screech and flung herself at the security gate, tearing at it with her pointed fingernails as if she would go on doing so until one or the other gave completely away. It reminded Larry of his dead son scratching at the basement door and the tune died on his lips, the mood gone.
Court, agitated by this new presence, began to hiss and pick at the gates as well, and before long Larry pictured them as two terriers, yapping and jumping at a chain link fence.
“How’s it going back there?” he hollered to Shane, a headache quickly developing.
“It’s coming,” Shane answered. He’d already found several items on the list, but not the one at the very top. The one his mother had spelled out in large capital letters.
“If you come across anything with Codeine in it, throw me out a bottle,” Larry joked, massaging his temples. To his surprise, a large white bottle sailed over the counter. It bounced off the gate and landed at his feet, half full of tablets.
Paveral. 30 mg.
“Toss that back when you’re done,” Shane said, raising his voice to be heard. “It’s on Mom’s list.”
Larry had to squat at the knees and reach down blindly to pick it up, which only seemed to upset the gallery. God knew why. He unscrewed the top and looked inside with the penlight, shaking his head and laughing softly to himself. There had to be 500 tablets left, enough to keep a man smiling and relatively pain-free for over a year, barring gangrene or wholesale amputation. He reached inside the wide mouth with his fingers and came back with roughly a dozen.
I could just take these, he thought, rolling the tablets loosely in his palm. I could swallow these down and take another handful and just drift off to sleep. Easy as pie. No more worries about food or safe water or ammunition. No more worries at all.
Except what you’re going to say to God.
“Oh, I’ll have plenty to say to Him,” he murmured, tipping the pills back inside the bottle; all except two. He looked at these after the lid was screwed back down and decided to tuck one in his pocket for later. Once they found a place to bed down for the night, the manager’s office or whatever. No sense turning himself into a zombie before his time. Ha-ha.
“Good one, Lar,” he grimaced, popping one of the tablets into his mouth and dry-swallowing.
“Heads up, Shane,” he called, lobbing the jar back to where it came from. Glad to be rid of it and the nagging temptation. Of course, he could always pull out his revolver and end it that way, but that would take some working up to; some serious reflection. Pills were something he was used to, something he took all the time. Aspirin, cold capsules, decongestant… what difference would his hand know, or his mouth?
“Ah-ha!” he heard Shane explain. “Found it! The last thing on the list except syringes.”
“Look up front for those,” Larry advised. “I usually see them while I’m waiting for a prescription. Insulin syringes. They come in pretty good-sized boxes.”
“Yep, here they are,” Shane replied, his voice closer to the counter now, right over Larry’s shoulder. “Shit.”
“What’s the matter?” Larry asked, raising his voice again. Shane’s emergence from the back shelves had excited Court and Julia.
“These boxes have like, a hundred… two hundred syringes in them. I don’t have enough room in my backpack for that many!”
“So don’t take the whole box. Take half, or a third; whatever you need. The needles should be capped. There’s no sense hauling back two hundred syringes if you’re only going to make a few injections.”
“Yeah,” Shane realized. “I’m gonna have to.” Larry heard him unzip his pack. “How’re you doing out there? It sounds awfully noisy.”
“Well, we’ve got two new friends at the moment,” Larry shouted. “I’d like to get out of this cage before we pick up any more. Two we can take care of; more than that and it starts to get dicey.”
“Almost done,” Shane assured him, his backpack zipping again, though reluctantly, as if he’d like to take more. A moment later his feet came sliding over the counter, the pack riding up against his neck as he slipped down beside Larry, as lumpy as a pillowcase stuffed with bricks.
“Looks like you just about cleaned them out,” Larry commented, eyeing the pack as Shane reached for his axe.
“Hardly,” Shane grunted. “This is just a skim off the top. You never know… someone else will probably need these drugs just as bad as we do, and I’d hate to have come all this way to find some asshole had cleaned out the shelves, taking more than he needed or could carry.”
“You’re a good kid, Shane,” Larry nodded, impressed. “No, seriously. We’ve lived next door to one another for years and I don’t think I ever realized that.” He offered a passing smile. “It makes me sorry we never got to know one another.”
“I’d say we made up for that today,” Shane said, his face bright pink in the light of the flare. “We’ve just about been joined at the hip.”
“Thank God for that,” Larry nodded, laughing. “I don’t know what I’d’ve done if I’d been cooped up in that house today.” A small shudder passed through him. “I don’t even like to think about it.”
“So don’t.” Shane clipped his penlight to his shirt collar, checked his pistol, then took a firm hold on his axe. “Think about how we’re going to get to the manager’s office.” He gazed at the darkness on the other side of the flare. “And where it might be.”
“That’s no mystery. It’s at the front of the store.” He nodded past Court and Julia. “Straight ahead, past the checkout lanes, then down a narrow hallway past the bathrooms.”
Shane cast him a sidelong glance. “It sounds like you’ve been there before.”
Larry shrugged. “I’ve never been inside… but a man’s got to occupy himself somehow while his wife’s in the powder room.”
“I guess so,” Shane nodded, his smile fading as he looked at the two obstacles they’d have to cut through to even get started. Court he’d seen, but the woman… He guessed she’d been pretty once, before Wormwood got a hold of her; maybe even beautiful.
The axe in his hands suddenly seemed much too heavy-handed, a brutal thing, almost obscene. He immediately recognized the danger of this way of thinking and pawned her off on Larry, who was unholstering his pistol. Court, on the other hand, could only benefit by the blade.
He tried to make the offer sound magnanimous, as if he were handing Larry a bargain. Larry, to his credit, accepted this arrangement without a word of protest.
“Ready?”
Shane took a deep breath and nodded.
“Mind where you’re swinging that axe,” Larry cautioned, reaching down with his free hand and getting a grip on the gate. He took his foot off the lip and rolled it up.
And to his horror and surprise, the barrel of his revolver caught in the blur of passing links and jumped out of his hand. It tumbled down his leg, off his boot, and clattered away into darkness.
8
“I dropped my gun!” Larry shrieked as Shane cut into Court’s left shoulder, dropping the dead boy to his knees. The heavy blade wedged into bone and refused to come out without a fight. Shane planted a foot against the bagboy’s chest and, twisting the handle, jerked it free, though the release sent him stumbling back against the pharmacy counter.
Julia, in the meantime, fell on Larry like a starving woman. He tried to push her away but she accepted his splayed fingers and outstretched arms welcomingly, like foreplay
, or tender appetizers before the feast.
Larry screamed and the two of them fell in a thrashing tangle.
Shane stepped forward with the axe, raised it over his head, and brought it down with a grunt on Julia’s back, severing her backbone and spinal cord with an audible snap. Her legs immediately ceased their kicking and scrabbling, but the biting and clawing end of her was still at work as if everything was still good.
Shane raised the axe again, taking a step forward, figuring to aim between her shoulders this time. He felt something whispery touch his pantleg and, glancing down, saw Court’s palsied fingers feeling blindly for a crease or a seam to grab hold of.
Shane stepped hastily back and brought the axe down, without aim or forethought. It angled shallowly across Court’s skull, shearing off an ear before sinking into his jaw, dislocating it with a pop that traveled up the handle like a foul ball rolling off a hardwood bat.
Court’s head lolled back, looking worse than ever, his right cheek lumpy and elongated where the hinge had shattered. His eyes rolled up at Shane’s penlight as if asking God Himself for mercy.
Shane swung the axe again and the prayer was answered. Court’s head was split down the middle like a rotten coconut, his jaw clinging stubbornly to the stalk of his neck while his hair (and the top of his skull) tumbled away toward the magazine rack.
This distracted him from Larry for perhaps 10 whole seconds, yet in those precious seconds Julia had been hard at work. She’d fallen across Larry at an angle which best presented his upper left arm to her snapping mouth — the tough weave of bicep and tricep just above the elbow. As Shane turned back she cut through an artery and a violent red jet sprayed against the front of the pharmacy counter, which only seemed to excite her all the more.
She made a sound like a woman rubbing herself toward climax and Shane, guessing Larry would be dead within seconds, cut her off abruptly at the neck.
Wormwood Page 21
