Wormwood

look. To check the bathroom and the closets and underneath their beds while she was at it; anyplace two scared boys might conceivably squeeze themselves.

In the meantime, he was going out to check the back yard.

12

“Well?” Mike sighed, his eyes on Rudy. “Which first?”

“The Navaro’s,” Rudy decided, gazing at the open doorway, “but I need to get my rifle.  I left it in Bud and Helen’s back yard.”

Mike raised an inquiring eyebrow, wondering what Rudy and Keith had been up to with shovels and rifles in the Iverson’s back yard.

Rudy briefly explained as the two of them cut through the narrow strip of lawn between the two houses, both keeping a cautious eye on the shrubs and windows along the way, mindful that there was still a young boy wandering about, not to mention his infant brother.

They rounded the corner leading to the Iverson’s garden and stopped dead.  Something was thrashing about in the raw dirt, its head and arms tangled in a torn and soiled bedsheet, trying desperately to claw its way out of the hole Rudy and Keith had dug. Its dead hands clutched at the loose soil and pulled it fruitlessly back into the grave.

“Shit,” Mike swore, his thumb pulling back the twin hammers of the shotgun.

The thing heard them. It turned around and made a sound like gas escaping from a torn bladder.

It was Bud; his eyes black, his teeth choked with topsoil.

An awful scream swooped across the yard, shocking them both. Bud turned to track it like a shark sensing a panicked splash.

Helen Iverson was standing at the far end of the patio, as white as a ghost, her expression conveying the dawning horror of one who thinks she’s buried her husband alive.

A strangulated moan rose from Bud and, forgetting the pistol he’d given her to protect herself, she ran to him.

13

The basement door standing open behind him, Larry moved out across the lawn like an astronaut leaving the safety of his capsule to take his first walk across the hostile vacuum of outer space. His eyes tried to see everywhere at once, giving him a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if the Earth were turning behind his back, throwing up the undigested remains of its dead.

“Mark?” he called warily, as if afraid of being overheard. “Brian?”

He heard a rustling in the lazy mass of junipers along the back fence and froze, his gun coming around and leveling in that direction. His eldest son crawled out into the faded sunlight, his shirt torn and his eyes fifty years older. His hair was full of dead needles.

“Mark?” Larry whispered, uncertain, his rifle still pointed at the boy. He felt a twitch jump through his trigger finger as the boy broke cover and bolted past like a rabbit, swallowed up by the basement door. Larry just had time to register an angry crisscross of cuts and scratches on his son’s back and arms before the door swung shut with a loud bang.

“Mark?” Larry called, the barrel of the gun drooping as he was confronted with the mute face of his own house, the door shut and the windows boarded over.

“Mark, where’s your brother?” he shouted, the sound of his voice bouncing off the siding. He realized that he was floating alone in open space, the hatch of his capsule screwed shut. There was a single bullet in the breach of his rifle and nothing to replace it with on this side of the door.

He turned back to the junipers, reasoning if one son had been hiding there the other must be as well. He managed seven or eight paces from the house when another noise, less furtive, caught his ear. He turned toward it, looking north up the rising hillside, and saw something that made his breath stop. Brian was laid out on his back at the edge of the lawn, not moving, and another boy was down on his hands and knees, leaning over him.

Giving him CPR, Larry thought at first. CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

His heart lurched, sending him stumbling over a seamless boundary that separated his life from that of his five-year-old son. He sprinted across the yard and was almost upon them before he realized, before he really saw what was happening.

It wasn’t mouth-to-mouth the kid was performing, it wasn’t CPR…

He was tearing out the bottom of Brian’s jaw with his teeth, devouring the soft flesh of his unprotected neck as if it were a particularly savory piece of chicken.

“Shit,” he heard someone swear, worlds away, and then a haggard scream raked down his spine.

Four-year-old Zack Navaro, who in life had often played trucks or soldiers with Brian in the back yard, looked up from the bloody tatters of his friend’s throat, saw Larry standing over him, and made a curdling noise like an old tomcat protecting a plump gray sparrow.

Larry saw the light of Wormwood in Zack’s eyes: a faint glow like a raging fever inside an otherwise empty skull. It gazed back at him, utterly alien, and he swung the heavy barrel of his rifle around, bringing it to bear inches from the boy’s face. Blood and flecks of pulpy gore were smeared across Zack’s chin, painting his teeth and dripping in long streaks down his neck, and Larry realized that this had all been stolen from him. That because of this his son would die and there was no good or God to be found in it, no matter how long he stared.

His face twisted. Tears rolled from his eyes and a strangulated sob, as bitter as black vomit, rose from his throat.

He tensed his stomach and pulled the trigger, expecting a sharp report but hearing only a dull snap, like two stones kissing in a dry riverbed. He looked down at the rifle in disappointment; it felt inert in his hands, a shape poured out of cheap metal and made to hang in a den rather than fire live rounds.

Zack Navaro stared up at him. Half a second before he tumbled over, Larry thought one of his eyes had widened, and then he saw the hole shot through the back of his head, bloodless and clean.

He pulled back the bolt and ejected the spent shell, his hands suddenly trembling.

14

Mike Dawley watched Helen run toward her husband’s grave with the slow clarity of a dream, one he’d suffered through a good many times and now knew every movement by heart. It carried with it the inevitable feeling of deja vu, of circumstances spiraling down to a textbook conclusion.

“Helen!” Rudy cried, his arms turned into shovels, which was a bit like something out of a dream itself. “Don’t!”

The words flashed through Mike’s mind a heartbeat before his neighbor spoke them aloud and he brought up the shotgun according to script, squeezing off a single, hastily-aimed shell before Helen fouled his line of sight. The scattering of pellets caught a piece of Bud, peppering his back and shoulders, but from that distance it might as well have been a clean miss. The only thing that was going to knock Bud back into his grave was a point-blank shot to the head.

Rudy dropped one of his shovels and ran toward the garden, shouting Bud’s name in hope of diverting his attention.