Wormwood

The thought brought back the final few minutes of the videotape he and Larry had watched on the news. The squad of soldiers perched in a sniper’s line atop the school gymnasium, firing down at unseen targets while a man screamed for help in the background.

It might have been his daughters’ school, or his son’s.

Or he himself might be up there, firing a rifle.

Or screaming for help.

His wife and children the blackened bodies piled high on the soccer field.

The essence of the broadcast was that the experimental treatments and vaccines had all failed. Wormwood had jumped the quarantine lines and was heading west, bringing death and destruction to big cities and small towns alike. It was not in its nature to leave any stones unturned (much less an entire lot of them) and the chances of his whole family escaping the epidemic unscathed was about the same as walking between the raindrops of a spring downpour.

His wife’s hand reached out and touched him.

“You’re tense,” she told him gently, moving her palm over his chest. “I can feel it coming off you in waves.”

He sighed and took her hand, kissing it before setting it aside and turning his back to her.

She drew slow circles on his back and felt his breathing deepen as he sank into the padded arms of the mattress.

“We need to start making plans,” he told her, his face to the wall, nudging her out of a warm drowse. “We need to start getting ready for this thing.”

Aimee propped herself up on an elbow. “Rudy, Chicago is almost two thousand miles away. They’ll figure out how to stop it before it gets much further.”

He flipped himself on his back and gazed at the ceiling. “I wish I could believe that.”

“That news report must have been something to tie you in knots like this.”

“It was. I don’t know whether to wish you’d seen it or be grateful you didn’t.”

“Well you know how television can be. They like to play things up, make them look bigger than they actually are. With the right editing and camera angles, they can turn a five man street scuffle into civil unrest. What they didn’t show you is how normal things are a block or two away. You only saw what they wanted you to see.”

He nodded, thinking of the pile of bodies and the black dog, the line of gunners on the roof.

“This looked like the apocalypse.”

She laughed softly in the dark. “People have been seeing the apocalypse for two thousand years.”

A dead man came shambling out of a dingy garage and then disintegrated in a storm of gunfire, taking a screaming soldier with him.

“This looked pretty convincing.”

The bedroom lapsed into silence.

“What have you been doing all night?” she finally asked.

“Watching the news. Thinking about what I’ll do when this thing finally shows up.”

“If this thing shows up,” she amended, touching a finger to his lips.

“If,” he allowed, though not believing it. Aside from the Chicago video, more snapshots of the epidemic were surfacing, opening up like new doors to Hell. And that was just the television; he didn’t even want to look at the internet. It didn’t matter if you called it Wormwood or Yellowseed, it wasn’t the sort of thing that just petered out of its own volition. It had a maw the size of Texas and wasn’t likely to stop chewing until there was nothing left but silent earth and rotting dead.

“What sorts of plans have you been making?” Aimee asked, though hesitantly.

“I drew a map of the neighborhood,” Rudy told her.

“That sounds harmless enough,” Aimee said, relieved.

“Maybe I’ll show it to some of the neighbors tomorrow,” he decided. “See if anyone else has given this serious thought.”

3

“It occurs to me,” Rudy began, reaching into his hip pocket and unfolding the map, “that if we stick together as a neighborhood, we can defend ourselves better than we could as individual houses. Look here,” he said to Larry, who was stubbornly disinclined to look at his map. “We have a unique situation in that we live in a cul-de-sac with the creek to one side and the hillside to another. Natural barriers that make the street easier to defend.”

“Son of a bitch, Rudy,” Larry whispered, glancing around to see if anyone had heard him. “Are you nuts? What are you doing talking like this, drawing up a map? Deliberately trying to start a panic?”

“No, I just thought we should be as prepared as possible for wh-”

“Prepared for what? That joke we saw on TV? Come on!” Larry scoffed, red blotches appearing high on his cheeks. He gestured at the map in open contempt, as if he’d like to snatch it out of Rudy’s hands and erase his name from the domino-shaped rectangle they were standing in front of.

Rudy looked at his next-door neighbor and adjusted his glasses. “If you think that what we saw last night was a joke, you’re badly mistaken Larry.” He nodded at the house, as if including it in their conversation. “Go inside and turn on your set. If it’s a joke, it’s awfully contagious.”

Larry smiled, shaking his head to show he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. “You know, with a few friends and a camcorder, I could put together a pretty convincing tape too. Nothing as good as the one last night, but then I’m an accountant, not a liberal arts major with no job and too much time on my hands. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, swinging an arm toward the house, “I’ve got some pruning to do before lunch.”

“If it helps, think of it as a storm,” Rudy suggested, “a hurricane. Take your truck down to the lumberyard and pick up some plywood. Stock up on canned goods and bottled water, maybe some candles and extra batteries. It never hurts to be prepared.”

“There’s nothing to be prepared for,” Larry maintained, turning back toward his garage.

“Do you have a gun?” Rudy asked, raising his voice.

Larry Hanna stopped along the zigzag of a patched crack and turned slowly around. What Rudy saw behind his pale blue eyes was another sort of patch, one that was under a great deal of stress at the moment.

“You know I do,” he said. “We went shooting with it last fall up at the pond. My dad’s target rifle.”

Rudy nodded. He remembered the rifle well: a single-shot .22 with a barrel as heavy as a cast iron skillet. It wouldn’t be much good in close quarters (except possibly as a club), but perched on a rooftop with a good scope, it would help keep Wormwood at a distance.

“You might at least pick up some ammunition,” Rudy said.

Larry opened his mouth to say something then shut it again. He took a step toward the curb, as if he couldn’t bear to shout his reply; that shouting might be overheard and lend his neighbor’s crackpot theories more credence.

“You’re not joking, are you? You really think that what happened in Chicago could happen here?”

Rudy regarded him for a moment, torn between the truth and not wanting to frighten him away. “At this point, Larry, I just think we ought to talk about it. Prepare ourselves for the possibility. I wouldn’t want to hear that it’s come after all the stores have been picked clean and it’s too late to do anything about it.” He raised a leading eyebrow. “Would you?”

“I guess not,” Larry allowed. “If I thought anything was coming.”

Rudy nodded. “Why don’t you come over to the house this afternoon? I’ll talk to a few others in the neighborhood — Bud Iverson and maybe the Dawleys — and see what they think about this?”

Larry pressed his lips together and gazed down the short length of Quail Street, his jaw grinding back and forth, undecided. “I’ll think about it,” he finally said.

“That’s fine. About three o’clock?”

Larry nodded once in acknowledgement; again, giving the idea as little weight and gravity as possible. To