She looked at Shane, then at Larry.
“I don’t want to live in a place where people do that to one another, where they die and come back wanting to eat their own children. At first I thought it might pass, that it would run its course and then things would go back to the way they’d been, but now… now everyone I know is dead and nothing’s ever going to be the way it used to be!” She started to cry and neither Shane nor Larry could summon any words to comfort her. After a full day out on the road, there wasn’t much they had seen to be optimistic about.
Her tears didn’t last long; apparently she’d almost cried herself out over such things. What was left was mostly hollow, an empty shell that wanted only to lie down in peace.
“Why don’t you tell Shane where the water is,” Larry suggested.
She looked up from her shoes to where he lay on the floor, a dim glimmer of hope in her eyes.
“I promise you,” he said softly, the revolver in his hand.
18
“You can’t mean it!” Shane objected, the outrage in his voice upsetting the candles, causing a corner of the office to flicker. “You can’t just shoot her like a rabid dog!”
Larry looked up at him. “Why not?”
“Why not?” Shane could hardly believe his ears. “Because she’s depressed! She’s not thinking right!”
“Maybe it’s the two of us who aren’t thinking right, coming all this way on a fool’s errand.”
Shane’s face hardened as if slapped. Slapped hard. “It’s not a fool’s errand,” he contended, his voice low and heated, like a banked bed of coals. He pointed at his backpack as if it offered irrefutable proof. “I came to get those for my father and I got them!”
“Yes, but how do you know he’s not already dead? Or what if Quail Street no longer exists?” If his earlier words were a cold slap, these were a pointed kick in the balls. “I’m going to tell you a thing or two, Shane, and I’m afraid you’re not going to like it much.”
Larry’s brow was dotted with sweat, as if speaking had become an effort for him.
“The first is that I never intended to go back. Now maybe that doesn’t come as a complete surprise to you, but that’s the way it is. I had intended to see you back home, but with my arm the way it is, that’s not going to happen anymore. I’d be a lump of deadweight on the back of that bike, unable to hold on much less defend myself, and I know for sure you’ve thought about that. You’re a smart kid, so let’s just leave it at that and not argue the point. I have no desire to die out there in that jungle; so if I get to choose, I’ll sit right here in this office and wait out my fate; and in the end, I’m keeping my gun to make sure I don’t come back.”
“You’re giving up?” Shane said, aghast. Contempt in his tone, though there were tears in his lashes. “You’re just going to sit here in this fucking room holding a gun to your head?”
Larry winced a little at the image. “I don’t think I’ll have to wait all that long, but yes, if that’s the way you want to see it, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Frankly speaking, I don’t think there are enough drugs in that backpack to cure me; your dad either, for that matter; but that’s only my opinion; frank and uninformed. If things were different… if my gun hadn’t caught in that gate and if my arm were whole and my wife and two sons were still alive, then there might still be some fight in me. But then given all that, there’s no reason to suppose I’d be sitting here, is there?”
Shane wiped his face and frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think I gave up on life when I lost my faith in God. If not then, it was surely the minute I put a bullet in my dead son’s brain. After that… Jan, Mark, this whole long day… I’ve been more or less a dead man walking, looking for a place where I could lie down and die. Last night by the fire, I agreed to come with you because I knew I’d find that place along the way.”
Larry looked around the room and nodded, as if satisfied. “It’s not exactly paradise, but it looks all right by candlelight.” His eyes found Shane again. “And more importantly, I get to choose it. Not something by the name of Wormwood.”
“But what about me?” Shane pleaded, his tears spilling openly now. “How am I going to get back home without you? I can’t drive the motorbike!”
Larry smiled. “Sure you can. There’s not much to it, and like I said, you’re a smart kid. You’ll figure it out, and it will go much faster without me. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but with some luck you’ll make it. And to that end, the best thing you can do for yourself is get a good night’s sleep.” He looked at Melinda. “I’d imagine there’s some food around here as well as water?”
Slowly, as if hypnotized by this drama, she nodded.
“I can’t imagine that she and I will have much use for it, so why don’t you go ahead and patch up my arm as best you can with those cotton balls and nylon stockings, dole me out a few more pills… and while you’re doing that Melinda can get the food and water. We’ll have a last meal together then she and I can sit up and watch over you while you sleep. Get to know one another.”
Larry grinned, tears streaming helplessly down his face.
“Who knows? Maybe after you’re gone, she and I will decide to run away together.”
19
When Shane awoke, half the candles had burned out and the rest were drowning, little more than blackened wicks floating in a last spoonful of paraffin. There were no windows or skylights within the office, but something inside him seemed to know that the sun would soon be rising.
He sat up and rubbed his face.
“Morning,” Larry said, looking worse for the night, red lines of infection spreading up and down his arm. Melinda was snoring softly against the floor, her respirations slow and labored.
“What time is it?” Shane asked, his mouth dry and thirsty.
“Time for you to think about leaving,” Larry answered.
20
Shane retrieved the shotgun from beneath the checkout counter and gazed at the silhouettes moving sluggishly against the faint blue dawn. He guessed that they’d picked up a few more since yesterday; three or four, maybe as many as half a dozen, but there was no indication they knew he was there. They were just milling about, wanting in.
Melinda moved beside him. “C’mon,” she whispered, “I’ll show you another way.”
He followed her through a dark maze of children’s and then women’s apparel to a fire exit next to the fitting rooms. He couldn’t see what was on the other side of it, but neither could they see in, so there was no reason to suppose any sort of crowd had gathered around it. It would not be remembered as an entrance, so in all likelihood that made it as good as a blank wall. Beyond would be a short skirt of walkway, and then the parking lot… as flat and as frightening as the end of the earth.
As far as his preparations went, it was the end. Beyond that, he imagined a motorcycle propped patiently against an apple tree, a house and a street he had once called home… but these things, he realized, might well be illusions, far and forever beyond his reach.
He checked his guns one last time and adjusted his backpack. There was an extra box of shotgun shells tucked in amongst the bottles and syringes, a dusty box that had fallen beneath the display case in Sporting Goods. Shane (thinking of the magazine rack) had gotten down on his hands and knees with the axe and out they’d come, like an unexpected bonus. A secret toy surprise. And as luck would have it, they fit the shotgun.
Now he looked at the dull metal face of the door.
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND.
“Good luck,” Melinda said, though without much enthusiasm. She looked like she wanted to get back to Larry. To the dark promise he was holding for her.
Shane hesitated. Though he and Larry had already said their goodbyes, it seemed wrong to just leave like this, knowing what would happen once she got back to the office.
“Tell Larry… tell him I’ll always remember him.”
It seemed so lit
tle, such a useless thing to say, yet Melinda seemed oddly touched by it, as if its real worth went beyond words. “I’ll tell him,” she promised, then did something even more unexpected: she kissed him on the check.
“Remember me too, even if it’s just a little.”
She smiled and for the first time she was beautiful.
He tucked the image away like a snapshot and carried it out the door with him.
21
Larry looked grim beneath the fading flicker of the last two candles, as if the disease had strengthened its hold on him since Shane had slipped away. He looked nervous, as if he wasn’t entirely sure he’d made the right decision.
He looked up at Melinda. “Did he get away all right?”
She nodded. “I watched him as long as I could. He made it out of the parking lot and over the fence.” A small, secret smile knit itself out of the shadows on her face. “He looked back while he was on the top of the fence and waved to me.”
Larry chuckled softly, closing his eyes to better see it. Slowly, as the image left him, his humor faded.
“Will you keep your promise to me?” Her voice was scared, uncertain, as if something fundamental had changed in him while she was away; the return of his faith, perhaps, or simply an unwillingness to part with his last few bullets.
“I’ll keep my promise,” he answered, trying to sit up a little straighter. “Are you ready?”
She nodded and moved across the room, getting down on her hands and knees beside him.
“What about a note?” he wondered, his palms damp, procrastinating now. “Isn’t there something you’d like to leave behind?”
She told him that Shane had taken it with him.
“All right,” he said wearily, lifting the revolver and cracking open the cylinder. There were no empty spaces inside; no room left for hope or second chances.
“Will you hold me?” she asked, her voice doubtful.
Larry nodded and she crawled up next to him, like a lover. “I almost forgot,” she said, looking into his eyes. “Shane told me to tell you something. He said that he wouldn’t forget you.”
Larry accepted this with a grateful nod, all that seemed left in him now.
Melinda reached up and kissed him as she had Shane, then took the barrel of the gun and put it between her eyes. A small and helpless shiver passed through her.
“Thank-you,” she whispered and Larry squeezed the trigger.
Her body jumped and then relaxed.
On the desk above, one of the last two candles hissed and then guttered out.
22
A deep and tomblike silence hung over Riverview Court as Shane chased his shadow westward along the back wall. The trailer park felt spent inside, played out, with nothing left to grace its days except the gentle progression of decay, the past slowly dissolving to cinderblock and bone.
The barred gate that he and Larry had stopped at was standing open now, though what that meant he wasn’t sure. Perhaps someone inside had survived the epidemic: a last soul who had waited out his chance and then slipped away like a thief.
Someone like himself.
He passed without stopping, pausing only as he reached the far corner. The orchard lay, cool and rustling, across a final gap. He peeked around the corner and saw a dead man, 40 or 50 yards away but wandering about in persistent circles, as if he’d lost something of vague importance in the dry grass and weeds.
Watching him, something in Shane seemed to lock up and a small voice inside his head urged him to turn back. Back to Larry and Melinda and the darkened cavern of the store. To simply end it, now, before another day’s atrocities began to heap themselves upon his shoulders. In that despairing moment the future seemed too dark, too heavy to bear.
The dead man turned, his bloody bathrobe billowing in the morning breeze.
And the next minute Shane was running. Not looking back or to either side… but to the cool and rustling trees.
For better or worse, it was as much of the future as he allowed himself to see.
23
Larry pushed Melinda’s body aside and felt along the edge of the desktop, reaching for the narrow drawer above the kneehole when he failed to find what he wanted, which was a pencil and paper.
Unlike Melinda, he felt a need to keep his dying thoughts close to him, spelled out as eloquently as he could manage before the last candle sputtered out, leaving him with nothing but darkness and a loaded revolver.
There was a pencil tray in the front of the drawer which yielded a well-chewed stub, but the paper to write upon was harder to come by. Deeper in the drawer, he supposed, or used as toilet tissue when the real thing became as extinct as the dodo. No matter, he thought, taking his arm back and reaching for his wallet. Surely it would contain a scrap — a business card or an old receipt — with enough blank space on the back to make his farewells to the world.
Instead, he found a heavy fold of paper tucked beneath the underside of his wallet. Curious, he tugged it free and held it up to the light.
To Whom It May Concern,
The salutation conjured an image of a city in smoking ruins, and a man gazing out over the destruction from the driver’s seat of his Impala.
Their first stop the previous day, at the overlook atop the ridge.
Larry had stuffed the note in his pocket to keep Shane from reading it, not bothering to read it himself. He unfolded the page and found himself face to face with God.
Lamentations, Chapter 3.
It was a quotation which Larry knew; one he had learned quite recently, in fact, due to its inclusion of the word “wormwood”; which had, of late, taken on some greater significance. In his studies he had found it a slippery word, one with uncertain or multiple meanings.
That, perhaps, had changed.
I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His wrath.
He has led me and made me walk in darkness and not in light.
Surely He has turned His hand against me time and time again throughout the day.
He has aged my flesh and my skin and broken my bones.
He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and woe.
He has set me down in dark places like the dead of long ago.
He has hedged me so I cannot get out; He has made my chain heavy.
Even when I cry and shout, He shuts out my prayer.
He has blocked my ways with hewn stone; He has made my paths crooked.
He has been to me a bear lying in wait, like a lion in ambush.
He has turned aside my ways and torn me in pieces; He has made me desolate.
He has bent His bow and set me up as a target for the arrow.
He has caused the arrows of His quiver to pierce my loins.
Larry closed his eyes and let the arm holding the page drop down to his side. His eyes were filled with tears and he spoke the last line of the note from memory, as if had been written especially for him.
“‘He has filled me with bitterness, He has made me drink wormwood.’”
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in darkness. The last candle had guttered out.
“No matter,” he said aloud, folding the note along its well-worn creases. He tucked half the fold inside his shirt pocket and left the other half out, like a badge. Something that God and the world could see.
Given a thousand years, he would never come up with anything better.
Postscript:
Quail Street
1
Quail Street had changed while he was away.
It had taken Shane an extra day to get home, but now it seemed that the effort had been for nothing. The west side of the street (including his own home) lay in smoldering ruins, the timbers hissing and steaming in the light rain like old dragon bones.
He let the engine die and found himself unable to get off the motorcycle; unable or unwilling.
He thought he had prepared himself for this.
There was no way to prepare oneself for thi
s. For the complete severance and destruction of one’s past; the thoughtless wiping away of everything that had kept him alive for the past two days. It broke something inside of him and, as the rain continued to fall, he found himself trembling, unable to stop.
“Oh Shane,” a voice whispered, straddling the seat behind him. “I’m so sorry.”
He let go of the bike and reached back, the street in blurs. He found a hand there to hold on to, to lend him strength and support.
He wondered how long before that, too, was stripped away.
2
Alone and short on ammunition, Shane had been forced to play things differently than he and Larry had the day before. When a problem arose — such as the black-clad gang camped alongside the bridge or the spreading kaleidoscope of Summertides — he was forced to wait it out or think of a different way around it, and these things naturally devoured time.
As the warmer, brighter colors began to leach out of the day, leaving shades of blue and gray behind, he turned his eyes to the passing homes and outbuildings, searching for a safe place to spend the night.
Eventually, he settled on one of the farmhouses along the way.
It was impossible to say what made it stand out from all the others he’d passed: that it was well back from the road or perhaps simply the lateness of the hour. Yet at the same time something about it seemed to call out to him in passing (as if it had been sitting there for years, waiting) and the next thing he knew he’d cut the engine, skidded off the pavement, and was pushing the bike up the narrow lick of driveway; veering not toward the house with its wide porch and inviting steps, but toward the brooding silhouette of the barn.
Wormwood Page 24
