Wormwood (15 page)

7

Mike Dawley was making love to his wife for the first time in eight months when the whistle sounded, screaming in its high, shrill voice from above as Pam was climbing toward her second orgasm and as Mike sensed an embarrassing amount of semen drawing back, getting ready to burst from his swollen end of his cock.  At the shriek of the whistle, however, they stopped dead, looked at one another in dawning panic, then scrambled madly out of bed, reaching for their clothes as the whistle continued its warbling cry and the rifle punched sharp holes in the stained fabric of the afternoon.

8

“Go downstairs!” Larry Hanna told his wife, taking his face away from the part in the curtains long enough to see that she was behind him.  “Take the boys and get down to the shelter!”

“What’s happening?”
Jan cried, her voice breaking into a terrified bleat the moment she saw the expression on her husband’s face.  A stark, pale fear had gripped him, instantly contagious.  Instead of calling her children, she took a step toward the window, wanting to see what was swooping down on them, its dark wings spread.

“Get Mark and Brian and
get the hell downstairs
!” Larry shouted, reaching out and giving her a rough shove, one that sent her backpedaling toward the sofa.

“What is it?”
she screamed, tears running down her face.  “Tell me what you see out there!”

He tensed and let the curtain drop, reaching for his rifle.  Rudy had knocked on his door and returned it the day after they buried Bud.  He’d asked Larry how preparations were going with the bomb shelter and Larry had shut the door in his face.  He’d regretted it later, but now, after what he’d just seen out the second story window, he knew he’d done the right thing.

He looked at his wife then slid back the bolt to insert a bullet.  “The Dawley kid is up on the roof shooting at something,” he told her, shoving the bolt back into place.

“Shooting at
what
?” she wanted to know, an ugly crack running down her face.  The days of isolation were taking a toll on her.

“I don’t know,” he lied.  “Something down the block.  Something I couldn’t see.”

What he had seen was Shane Dawley blowing his goddamn whistle as he shot down one of the Navaro kids.  It wasn’t Zack — the one Brian sometimes played with — but Zack’s younger brother, Chase.  He had been crossing the road in a sleepy kind of shuffle when the rifle snapped and knocked the toddler down to the asphalt, a piece of his shoulder turning to vapor, a rust-colored spray against the white of his t-shirt.

As the whistle blew, the kid got slowly to his feet again, as if it were all just a bad dream.  He grimaced, took a step toward the Sturling’s house, then fell down again, this time after the rifle knocked his head sharply back.  After that, the kid stopped moving, but from his vantage Larry saw his mother come tottering out the front door in next to nothing; a silky veneer of white satin that looked a size too small for her.  She was moving in that same sleepy step, in no particular hurry to get to her fallen son.

The next time Larry looked out the window, his wife was finally moving downstairs to the shelter and the street was in chaos.

9

When Naomi Sturling heard the alarm, she put down her book and went to the front door, peeking out just in time to see the little boy from across the street fall down in a hard splash of his own blood.

“Oh my God!”
she screamed, her hand flying to her mouth in shock.  At that point she stopped thinking altogether and merely reacted, throwing the door open and running down the lawn to where he lay limply in the street.

Dimly, she heard her husband calling her name, warning her back in the house, but by the time it sank in it was already too late.  She knelt down beside the boy, realizing as she did so that he’d been shot at least twice, and that he looked a lot worse than two bullets could possibly account for.  It was obvious that he was dead, but he’d already begun to decompose: his eyes were glazed; a shrunken pair of cataracts, and his skin was deeply bruised, corrupt in places, like a badly-handled piece of fruit.  And as she was noticing these things, it escaped her attention that Shane Dawley’s rifle was still firing, that the boy’s mother was almost on top of her, that her husband and Rudy Cheng were sprinting toward her with a pair of dirty shovels and screaming for her to run.

A shadow fell across her and she looked up into Irene Navaro’s eyes.  Her first impression was that of an eclipse, that something dead and gray had swallowed up the sun.  That its light was shining through Irene’s eyes, but dimly, like a powerful flashlight shining through layers of skin, giving off a bloody glow.

Then both the sun and the moon toppled from the sky.

Irene grasped Naomi’s head in her hands and started to pull.  There was nothing gentle or neighborly at all in her touch, but something like the hardened grip of a schoolyard bully who’s taking a soccer ball away and means to have it no matter what.

When Naomi refused to give it up, Irene made a wet, hissing sound behind her teeth and leaned down to take a bite out of Naomi’s scalp.  Awakened from her stupor by the warm splash of blood in her mouth, Irene held on tenaciously, gnawing down through bone and brain.  When Keith reached her she was dug into his wife’s head like an enormous tick, bright red blood running down her chin and spreading across the white satin of her nightgown.

He swung the shovel into the small of Irene’s back, the blade biting into the flesh there and releasing a grim putrescence.  A slow trickle of rust.  She seemed not to notice, so intent was she on the soft, sweet window in Naomi’s skull.

Keith roared and hit her again, this time swinging the shovel down over his shoulder, getting some real muscle into it and slamming the blade down flat atop Irene’s head.  That seemed to get her attention.  Naomi fell out of her grasp and slumped down beside the boy, her eyes wide with shock, as if she were turning end over end, falling down a dark and bottomless hole.

Rudy caught a passing glimpse of the damage Irene had done and knew that she was going to die, perhaps even before the current crisis was over.  He thought bitterly of his rifle, leaning against the alder in the Iverson’s back yard, three or four steps from the hole they’d been digging.  In the sudden commotion he’d forgotten it; or rather, it had seemed more imperative to get to Naomi than to backtrack, especially with the shovel in his hand.  Keith, apparently, had thought the same.

Irene’s lips curled back like the petals of an exotic flower, something moist and tropical and grossly repellant.  A fleshy corsage a sensible girl would never let anywhere near her breast.  Rudy tilted his shovel over his shoulder like a slugger about to knock one out of the park.  Keith slipped around him while Irene was distracted and crouched down beside his wife.  A low moan rose from the pavement, one of dead realization and despondency, and Keith began to drag his wife up the lawn toward the dark hatch of his front door, leaving Rudy alone with his shovel and the late Mrs. Navaro.

She shuffled toward him, her arms outstretched, eyes black against the falling sunlight, Naomi’s blood dripping like saliva from her open mouth.  Rudy heard a sudden volley of gunshots, voices screaming from other places, but he was afraid to take his eyes off Irene.

He swung his shovel and struck her hard across the temple, the blade ringing in the street like a poorly-made gong.  It knocked her off-balance for a step, but seemed a lacking deterrent, more a nuisance than a threat.  Grimacing, Rudy adjusted his grip on the handle and turned his club into a spear, a weapon he could jab and stick at her rather than swing.

Her breasts sagged against her bloodied nightgown as she approached, the nipples flat and dead, no longer capable of becoming chilled or excited.  Rudy took a step back and to the side.  He threw the shovel forward and jerked it back, a deep, crescent-shaped wound gaping in her face, slicing across the bridge of her nose and down her right cheek, spilling out a gore that looked like rancid chutney.  Something made out of rotten pie cherries.  The smell alone was enough to repel him.

Rudy backpedalled and almost collided with Don, Irene’s chain-smoking husband.  Don had apparently wandered out the front door of his house while Rudy’s back had been turned, and this was what the shouting voices had been trying to warn him about.  It looked like Shane had been running interference for him as well, because Don had already picked up two or three bullet wounds in his short walk down the driveway: one in the chest that should have brought down a deer, one in the neck that caused his head to loll oddly, and an angry channel that had grazed his cheek and carried away most of his left ear.  None of them appeared to be fatal, whatever that meant anymore.

For a dangerous moment Rudy froze between the two of them, husband and wife, unsure what to do, which way to turn.  His shovel was drawn back, ready to strike again, and since it was more or less aimed at Irene he threw it forward with a savage grunt, catching her full in the face again.  When he pulled it free, her jaw hung limp and broken, like a door whose pins have been pulled out of its hinges.  It dangled toward her breastbone, stretched in an impossible yawn.

Good
, Rudy thought, congratulating himself.  At least she couldn’t bite him now.

He pivoted to try the same trick on Don and saw a third figure approaching, this one in bare feet and an unbuttoned shirt flagging out behind him.  To Rudy’s relief he saw it was Mike and he was running from the far end of the block with a shotgun in hand.

“
Get back!
  Get away from them!” Mike shouted, his feet slapping the pavement as he brought the gun forward, coming to a stop and seating it against his shoulder.  Rudy threw his shovel at Don, chipping a shallow divot in his ribcage, and then ran, dodging Irene’s outstretched arms and nearly tripping over her dead son on his way toward the west side of the street.

The shotgun boomed behind him and Don’s head became a mass of raw hamburger, a walking meatball.  He stumbled, fell, and then slowly started to get up again.  Mike stepped up close to Irene, his face a pale grimace, screaming as he blew her head from her shoulders with one infallible pull.  It lifted away from her body, bounced lopsidedly, and then came to a full stop before her legs gave up and her body crumpled.

Don had regained his feet and was turning around in slow circles like a broken toy, feeling the hazy air with both hands as if attempting (without benefit of eyes or ears or nose) to reacquire his former neighbors.

Mike started to raise the shotgun to finish him off but the rifle rang out and Shane beat him to it.  Don’s bleary red head snapped back with the force of the bullet and he dropped to the pavement without further protest.

Mike turned toward his son, lifted a trembling okay sign on the end of his arm, and let the shotgun’s barrel droop toward the bloodstained asphalt.

10

A profound silence fell over Quail Street.

Three bodies lay in the street and a garish trail of blood bumped over the curb in front of the Sturling’s and disappeared inside the house, leaving a dark smear upon the grass.

Rudy picked up his shovel and Mike took up the one Keith had dropped and together they went from corpse to corpse, probing them first to see if they got a reaction, then using the tools to decapitate the two whose heads were still attached, just to be sure.

To his dying day, Rudy knew he’d never forget the feeling of stepping on the blade and working it down through two-year-old Chase’s pale and slender neck.  As the last stubborn cord was severed, the boy’s eyelids seemed to slacken and something as grateful as a sigh eased from his open mouth.

It left Rudy cold, shivering.

He looked at Mike and Mike looked back at him.  Neither of them had to say a word.

They both knew how many sons the Navaros had.