Wormwood

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.

And as far as the open door on the Sturling’s side of the street…

Well, that would have to be looked into as well.

11

While attention was focused on the opposite end of Quail Street, a separate (and for the most part, unknown) crisis was developing at the Hanna’s. Jan had left her husband standing at the living room window, but when she went down to collect Mark and Brian, their two sons, they were nowhere to be found. What’s more, the door to the backyard was standing wide open.

She called their names, the first bright stitches of panic working through her. The sight of an open door was enough to jolt her these days, and when she called a second time and still got no answer, she clutched her hands to her face and screamed for Larry.

He came pounding down the stairs, his rifle leading the way. After the things he’d just witnessed upstairs (and from the pitch of his wife’s voice), he almost expected the rec room to be painted with blood.

“What is it?” he shouted, eyes bulging, his head whipping from side to side, but there was nothing for them to catch on except the weeping figure of his wife.

He realized the door was open, that a bright oblong of sunlight was standing against the opposite wall, standing where no such oblong had a right to be. The thought of his two sons streaked across the room like a ghost and his wife’s panic exploded inside him like a fireball, scorching his nerve-endings and leaving him trembling.

“Where are they?” he screamed, his voice a raw wound, ragged and glistening, as if they were already lost.

“I can’t find them!” she screamed back, her face livid, two red marks where her hands had been. “They won’t answer!”

“Did you look in their rooms?” he shouted, resisting the urge to stride across the room and slap her. The very sight of her in such a condition made it hard for him to think.

No, she realized, she hadn’t. But even so, their bedrooms weren’t that far away; even with their doors shut they should have heard her, especially now that the television and computer were defunct. Yet she hadn’t checked and Larry seemed to recognize this fact in her eyes. He thrust his finger toward the hall and told her to