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 from 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.
Neither of these had come from Mike’s shotgun.
Keith had probably been wandering around the house in shock, his hair and clothes saturated with his own blood as well as that of his wife. At least he’d had the presence of mind to put a bullet into her.
By the sound of his breathing, by the shallow sobs that came between each exhalation, Rudy surmised Mike was having trouble finding a pulse. He could see for himself that Keith’s chest was no longer rising and falling.
“Mike,” he began, his finger curled tautly around the trigger, “I think perhaps you should—”
Back away from him,
Rudy had meant to say, but Keith’s eyes were suddenly open, burning with the faint phosphorescence of Wormwood, and the words turned to dust on his tongue. Mike froze, a sharp gasp punctuating his surprise as Keith’s head darted up, quick as a cobra. Two of Mike Dawley’s fingers disappeared in a heartbeat, tumbling down the open gullet of his neighbor’s throat like mackerel down a shark. There was an impatient attempt at chewing, a vicious gnashing of incisors, then the fingers were gone.
Mike screamed, holding up his bloody hand as if it were on fire, capable of engulfing him.
A part of Rudy seemed to step back from his own body and gaze down from the vantage of a casual observer, a disinterested witness in a world that had slowed almost to a stop. He watched coolly as the more solid, practical part of him stepped forward, thrust the muzzle of the rifle against Keith’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. A nearly bloodless hole appeared, tunneling down through the decaying corridors of Keith’s brain.
Keith’s red and feverish eyes looked up and Rudy jerked the trigger again, unaware that he too was screaming.
There was a moment of uncertainty, a sputtering of half-severed connections, then Keith lay still, the Wormwood fading from his pupils.
“Jesus,
Jesus
…” Mike repeated, trembling as he clutched his bleeding hand to his chest.
Rudy glanced at him and the two split parts of him clicked jarringly back together. Time resumed its normal cadence and he fell to his knees, breathless.
In the halflight, Mike wept for his two lost fingers, still wriggling in Keith’s coiled guts.
Rudy wept for the hours and days stretched languidly ahead, for darkness without the hope or promise of a dawn.
26
As twilight gathered in the easterly corners of the sky, they touched matches and disposable lighters to the wadded balls of newspaper and the pyre began to burn. Slowly at first, as the flames worked inward, then eagerly as the lines joined hands and the dry braces of kindling took hold.
The flesh was the last thing to catch fire, and when it did a sickening smell rose in greasy billows over Quail Street, wafting through the treetops as the breeze carried it in a leisurely and northwesterly direction. Fat crackled and snapped like pine pitch, hair smoldered and jackstraw bones shifted beneath the weight of the seasoned cordwood. Skulls glowed and grimaced from deep inside the oven.
Brian Hanna, Keith and Naomi Sturling, Bud and Helen Iverson, and the Navaro family in their grim entirety.
The four scarecrows who came to rob them, cut down from their poles and burned with their appellations, their time of usefulness passed; gone with the coming of Wormwood; lost on the illiterate dead.
Fourteen bodies in all.
And eleven left to watch them burn.
27
Night fell over the land and the pyre continued to smolder as the wood and bodies gave way to tar and asphalt underneath.
Rudy looked beyond the flames to the three houses standing unoccupied at the far end of the street. As they’d searched through them earlier, they made certain to close the doors and windows once the valuables had been salvaged: the guns and ammunition, the food and bottled water, the candles and batteries.
Yet there was something unsettling about empty houses that had the power to stare back at you.
Houses that haunted you with their stale rooms and drying bloodstains, with the memory of things you’d seen and done inside.
So they’d drawn the curtains and locked the doors to better keep those terrible secrets inside.
Rudy shuffled his feet and looked behind him. The women had gone inside, having little stomach to watch the pyre burn to its bitter end, and Mike had retired as well, his hand inflamed, swollen so badly after his wife had stitched it shut that he’d had to swallow a few Codeine tablets from their medical stores just to keep from passing out from the pain.
Rudy looked at the Dawley house and wondered if he was sleeping.
He wondered if sleep were possible.
One day in town and Wormwood had already gobbled up half the street. Three out of six houses.
Would its appetite be as healthy tomorrow? Would it be content to wait that long?
He looked at Larry and Shane; aside from himself, the last two holdouts.
Larry had emerged from his house after the tragic death of his son, his anger and denial gone, turned to a sluggish brand of defeat. He had hardly spoken a word, hardly taken his eyes off the pyre all evening, as if he knew just where his son lay inside. Rudy felt sorry for him but wondered how much help he’d be once the next crisis came. He seemed to have given up the fight, and even by firelight his face looked haggard and gray, as if pieces of him were already dying.
Shane, on the other hand, seemed to be emerging from his shell. He too seemed to have aged, but in a positive way, from adolescence into adulthood, as if his life before Wormwood had only been a prologue. Over the last two weeks, his mettle had been tested and he’d come out the stronger for it; less uncertain of himself.
And what about me?
Rudy wondered.
How have I changed?
Ah, that was much more difficult to say. He was certain there had been changes, as marked as those which had reshaped the others, but he found his perspective wasn’t as clear. He felt like the same man he’d been a day, a month, even a year ago, but he sensed that this was untrue. You couldn’t fight for your life, for the lives of your family and neighbors, without changing. Not after killing a man, after witnessing people around you die vivid, horrible deaths… after pointing a rifle at a 6-month-old and telling yourself you were doing the right thing in pulling the trigger.
The stress fractures were no doubt there, but they were still too small to be seen.
He found himself shivering despite the heat.
What was the point even considering it? Whatever he and the others were tonight would be reshaped tomorrow. Then again the next day, and the next…
Ultimately, their destiny was one and the same as the ashes in the fire. It was only a question of putting it off a little longer — a day, an hour; perhaps only another fleeting moment.
Long enough to find some sense or reason to make it worth the living.
Or worth the letting go.
28
Pam Dawley knocked softly on the bedroom door and then quietly entered. She didn’t want to disturb her husband if he was sleeping, but needed to check the stitches she’d sewn into the ends of his fingers to make sure they weren’t bleeding or infected. As soon as she cracked the door, however, she knew that she had worries about the latter, because there was really no mistaking the smell. Even working in a hospital, she’d never gotten used to it; that dank and swampy smell, as close as a body could get to rotting without actually dying. It hung like a dark green mist about the room, unable to escape with the plywood over the window and the air conditioning gone.
She closed the door behind her, not wanting it to seep into other parts of the house, and pointed her flashlight at the foot of the bed. Mike seemed to react unfavorably to its touch, moaning aloud and struggling against the damp press of the sheet.
She turned the beam away and the shadows lengthened, they moved to the far corner behind the hamper and trembled as if they too wanted out. Mike sat up in bed with a violent start, his eyes wide, straining against the light, and Pam let out a short, fluttering scream, her free hand flying to smother it back inside her mouth.
“Who is that?” he gasped, squinting across the room, his bandaged hand reaching for the loaded pistol he’d insisted she leave on the nightstand. Now it looked like he would shoot her with it. The gun, however, slid away and tumbled to the floor as he tried to pick it up, unaccustomed to the alterations that had been done to his hand; half his middle finger and three-quarters of the ring finger next to it now gone.
“It’s
me
!” she cried, turning the flashlight on herself, momentarily blinded by the beam. “It’s
Pam
, your wife!”
“Christ,” he sighed, letting the gun lie where it had fallen and rolling back against the pillow, his hair soaked with sweat. He raised his hands to cover his face, flinched when the stained dressings touched his skin, and closed his eyes against the grim reminder. Shaking his head and wishing it away.
For a long moment, Pam wondered if he’d forgotten she was there, and then his eyes opened slowly on the darkened room.