Wormwood

from one place to another, that would have been fine; but to dig up poor Bud Iverson (who they’d just laid to rest, for God’s sake!) and practice target shooting on his head; no, that was just another ghost to track back inside the house; not at all what he had in mind.

Still, judging from recent events, he couldn’t deny that Rudy had a point. It was definitely a job that needed looking into, and better to take care of it in the cold light of day than wake up in the middle of the night and find Bud crashing through the window.

So they had Aimee ask Helen over on the pretext of putting together some food for the meeting that afternoon, stopped by the Dawley’s and told Shane what they were up to, then wrapped their shovels and Rudy’s rifle in a long piece of tarpaulin and carried them across the street to the Iverson’s garden.

“Let’s make this as quick as we can,” Rudy suggested, donning work gloves while Keith spread out the tarp to catch the soil.

“My thoughts exactly.”

They glanced about the back yard, saw that no one was watching, then attacked the ground in short, swift strokes.

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