Wormwood (27 page)

Normally, the drive past the golf course was like cruising alongside a large and sprawling park.  The landscape was green and well-tended, as desirable to the eye as the groups of condominiums that had been built up along its westward border.  Quiet, unobtrusive, with gated cul-de-sacs and discreet privacy signs to discourage idlers and passing tourists.

Not so any longer…

Wormwood reminded them that Summertides, despite its isolation and well-groomed links, was actually a
densely-populated
residential district; an easy fact to overlook because the people who could afford to live there were well-to-do and (by and large) of retirement age.  They were a population that enjoyed itself
quietly
and — aside from a round of golf or a summer cocktail party —
indoors
.  Even the RV park on the south side kept itself neat and well-behaved, filled with white-haired retirees and migrating snowbirds who had more money invested in their trailers than most people did in their homes and savings accounts.

And when Wormwood hit, it cut through the place like a buzzsaw.

Because the residents were aging, there was a much greater incidence of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease… the sort of conditions that will lead to heart attacks and strokes… which in turn will generate lots of dead bodies, especially if a sudden shock like Wormwood descends and they can’t get to a doctor or hospital.

In a place like Summertides, the disease spreads quickly and there are very few places to hide.  Condominiums and RVs do not make good shelters or fortresses.  They peel and fall apart like particle board slapped with a cheap veneer.

And after a single day, the former residents had come spilling out to wander the greens and fairways (not to mention the aisles of the adjoining shopping center) like open house — with free buffet! — at a new retirement villa.

18

A group of four or five pressed through a hedge of arborvitaes along the shoulder of the old highway.  Blue-haired women swinging jeweled purses and balding men in ball caps and tennis whites; gruesome smears of blood across their hands and faces, hardening to a deep crimson down the front of their clothes.

One of the women stumbled and the rest tripped over her, tumbling down on brittle bones into a shallow drainage ditch.  Larry backpedaled the bike while Shane fired several shots from the 9mm.  The bullets punched brutally through their withered flesh, opening bloodless wounds and tossing them back, but they all got up again.

“Shit! 
Look out!
” Shane swore, swinging the pistol over Larry’s head and firing point-blank at an old woman who looked a bit like a disheveled Angela Lansbury.  The shot snapped her head back as her fingernails scratched faint white lines down the sleeve of Larry’s suede jacket.  Another — this one too torn and savaged to resemble anything but a corpse — reached over the fallen Ms. Lansbury with a grin that came from having half her cheek ripped away.  Shane saw a yellowjacket crawl angrily from her nostril and take flight before she too received a merciful bullet.

Yet for every one that fell, three more popped through the hedge to take their place, attracted by the motorcycle and the sound of gunfire, by the smell of warm blood.

By the time Shane’s guns were empty, a vast, white-capped sea had appeared before them, pouring frantically out of the entrance to the shopping center, still a quarter-mile distant.  Robbed of any individuality they once may have possessed, the overwhelming mob came boiling down the dull gray course of the highway: running, limping and trampling over one another in their irresistible
need
to get at the last two living souls left in sight, to spread the disease to every crack and corner of the landscape — a solid wave of Wormwood, like the scourging waters of a burst dam.

“Oh my God…” Shane whispered, staring into the shrieking face of it, his blood ice cold.

Larry swore despondently and turned the bike around, retreating before they’d even laid eyes on the pharmacy.  He shouted for Shane to hold on and gunned the Yamaha back the way they’d come, the back end dragging something with white hair and a polo shirt that was determined to come with them.  It held on stubbornly, pulling itself up until the knobby tread of the rear tire began sheering away its sagging face, leaving a sticky pulp on the fender.

When there was nothing but the raw scream of a mouth left, it finally fell away, but not without taking the fender with it.

Shane watched it grow smaller behind them.  A lump on the road that got to its feet — the yellow stripe of the fender still clutched in both hands — then went tumbling blindly off the shoulder.

19

When they were well clear of the infestation, Larry let the motorcycle coast to a gentle stop under a shady line of elms alongside the highway.  He cut the engine and drew a shaky breath.

“My God,” he whispered, head down in defeat, or prayer.  “This thing’s worse than we thought.  A
lot
worse.”

Shane agreed that it was, his voice slow, without much emotion.

Larry glanced over his shoulder.  “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere near that pharmacy.”

Shane shook his head, trying to halt the endless replay of every bullet, the shudder of the bike as the back tire erased an old man’s face in a matter of seconds.  It wasn’t much like sniping with a rifle from his rooftop: where he remained distant and untouchable, like an angry god.  This was
personal
, just beyond his fingertips.  He closed his eyes and saw bruised fingernails scratching through suede; his arm shifting as a bright spray of blood caught the midday sun.

“We could try a different approach; ride right over the golf course, maybe; but to tell you the truth, I don’t think it would make a lick of difference.  The whole development is overrun.”

“How come there are so
many
of them?” Shane wondered.  “I mean, I was expecting some people, but they were
all
dead!”

Larry nodded.  “A bunch of old folks sitting around in their trailers; I doubt they had much of a chance.  When it started it probably went through the place like a forest fire, jumping from one to the next.”

A breeze came up, moving through the branches above them.  It carried with it a tainted smell, like scorched sulfur.  Shane felt a tingle on the back of his neck and checked the stretch of road behind them, certain that something was still following, something in a polo shirt looking for its face.  The old highway was empty though, at least as far as the last bend.

“So what now?” Larry asked.  “The drugstore in Brace?”

“That’s the plan,” Shane answered, though after the mess they’d just run into, their plans suddenly seemed naïve, laughable, like something cobbled together out of bent nails and twine.

“Fine by me,” Larry agreed, “but I gotta tell you I’m not overly optimistic.  This whole trip may turn out to be a wash.”

Shane sat silently on the back of the bike, willing it forward.

“But like I said,” Larry shrugged, raising a leg to kick the engine to life, “that’s fine by me.”

20

The country between Summertides and Brace was almost peaceful, though it was surely a trick of the light; a deception, the look of a population in hiding.

They passed through low, green pastureland, the houses two and three stories and sold with enough acreage to ride horses or raise a fair amount of livestock.  They stood widely-spaced and well back from the highway, landscaped with duck ponds and greenhouses, accented with tire swings and vegetable gardens.

Some of the houses were boarded up, nailed shut with rough planks and sheets of plywood, like the ones they’d left behind on Quail Street.  One even seemed to wink at them as they passed: a heavy curtain parting briefly in an upstairs window and then falling, revealing a pale white oval that looked to Shane like a damaged pupil.  He raised a hand to it in greeting, but it didn’t return the gesture.  Most likely the house simply wished them on their way.

Others they passed simply looked dead — squared-off tombstones jutting out of the landscape with a decided cant or vacancy to their timbers, as if something had gotten in while they were sleeping and eaten away at their supports.  The windows seemed glazed and listless and the doors hung open in dull surprise.

One had burned right down to the foundation, leaving nothing but a sharp smell in the air and a deep scorch on the ground.  The trees standing around it (though neither birch nor willow) seemed to be weeping, as if they’d lost something unimaginable.

The smell deepened and a short distance further they came across another smoky ruin, then a third, smoldering away on a patchy field of ashes.  This time even the trees had perished; what was left of them looked like fingers, black and arthritic, clutching desperately at the open face of the sky.

As they continued west, Larry and Shane saw two small skeletons heaped beside a charred post that might once have supported a mailbox; the bones black, carbonized, grinning bitterly at the warped pavement.

The nearer they got to Brace, the blacker the landscape became until, topping the last low rise, it became obvious that there was no township of Brace any longer.

21

The ashes were still hot in places, but it was apparent that the fire hadn’t broken out the previous day, touched off by the arrival of Wormwood.  It was several days, if not a week old and appeared to have started in the northwest quarter of town, where the old fruit warehouses were stacked together.  From there it had marched eastward, blown on the prevailing winds, through the center of town.

Seasoning in the sun for over forty years, the timbers of the drive-in burger stand had gone up as if eager to burn, leaving a fine, almost white layer of ash in its shallow foundation.  Across the street, the market and drugstore had collapsed into one another, leaving a scorched pile of rubble.

Those who had come out to fight the fire had perished in the streets, their bodies baked black and then devoured to the bone.  They lay where they had fallen, alone or in pairs.

For Shane and Larry, after Summertides, Brace was like another room in Hell: grayer, grittier, and completely desolate.  There was no life within its borders: no people, no pets or livestock, not even scavengers such as birds or insects.  The conflagration had consumed everything but brick and stone, leaving nothing for them to pull apart or bicker over.

When Larry let the engine die at the crossroads, all they could hear was the soft abrasion of the wind, rising and falling through the barren streets, rubbing and erasing what little remained.

The hardest part for Shane to digest was not the death and destruction, but the simple fact that they had no idea — none at all, in drawing up their plans — that Brace no longer existed.  Six, maybe seven miles from Quail Street and they hadn’t a clue.

Before Wormwood, before the electricity went out, they would have been watching the fire on television before it had a chance to jump the roof of the first warehouse.

Since then, the world had gotten bigger.  Much, much bigger.

Away from his parents, from his home, Shane was just beginning to realize the complications…

Brace had burned to the ground because cities and towns were no longer connected.  In fact, the underlying glue that held civilization itself together was rapidly dissolving, and he suddenly remembered that Chicago, like Brace, no longer existed.

Without television, without electricity and the internet, what else might be happening in the world?  There was no way to tell.  How many other places — towns and cities whose names he’d known since childhood — had unknowingly slipped off the face of the planet?

Aside from bits of gossip or hearsay from people passing through those places, the only way to tell would be to travel there himself.  And what were the odds, these days, of purchasing a plane ticket to New York or Washington, DC?