Slipping another cartridge into the shotgun, Mike followed helplessly at his heels. At this point he knew where both shells were going; the uncertainty was whether or not he’d have to break the breach open and load a third for Rudy.
15
Zack Navaro’s small and lifeless body had fallen over Brian’s chest and Larry had to drag him away by the ankles to see the full extent of the damage done to his son.
“Oh
Brian lay on his back at the edge of the lawn, his arms splayed out slightly from his sides, as if in supplication or gentle offering.
“No,” Larry winced, falling to his knees, the phrase hammering at him so persistently that he had to clench his fists to get it to fade to a tolerable whisper.
A shotgun fired somewhere in the near distance, sending an involuntary twitch along his spine.
Larry opened his eyes again and looked down at his son.
To his surprise, Brian was gazing back at him.
16
Helen reached her husband well ahead of them, hardly aware of the shot Mike fired from the edge of the patio or what it might have told her.
Bud took her eagerly, hauling her into the grave and tearing at her before she even realized she’d fallen. He bit into her breast as a lover might, searching for the shortest route to her heart.
She tasted her own blood and, as the shock set in, wondered if this might be for the best.
She had her husband back.
And he had her.
17
Two more shotgun blasts: the sounds chasing one another across the hills and folds.
In the silence that came afterward, Larry Hanna got to his feet, his eyes fixed on his son. Unlike Helen Iverson, Larry had no illusions or misconceptions about what he was seeing, no fatherly urge to gather Brian into his arms and cry out his thanks to God’s mercy.
He knew his son was in Hell.
He knew it was Wormwood (and not Brian) crawling slowly across the lawn because he’d seen the same feverish glow in Zack’s eyes. The same terrible vacancy, burning to be filled, as if Larry had something it thought it could swallow despite the ragged hole in its throat.
Larry raised the rifle, remembered he’d fired his only bullet, and quickly reversed his grip, bringing the butt forward to use if he had to.
Brian continued his awful crawl, his head lolling listlessly, like a sunflower on a dandelion stalk, but his eyes never wavered. He gazed at his father through bruised lids and bloody lashes. Larry took a cursory swing with the gun but the thing in his son’s body didn’t even flinch, it just kept right on coming. After two more fruitless feints, Larry found himself backed up against the side of the house. He banged on the basement door with the flat of his palm, shouting for Jan to open up.
Brian came closer. Very soon, Larry realized, he was going to have to make the terrible choice of braining his son or dying with him. It was all well and good to tell himself it wasn’t really Brian; that it was the damned disease using his body, but that was an awful hard pill to swallow, even with his throat in tatters and his eyes the way they were.
“
With Brian a few feet away and closing, Larry heard a frantic struggle erupt on the other side of the reinforced panel: his wife screaming at Mark to open it, for God’s sake open the door and let his father in, while the two of them fought for the handle. Larry heard his eldest son shout that they were all dead, that Zack Navaro had eaten Dad and Brian and now he wanted to come inside and eat
And while this argument played itself out, time ran out on Larry’s side of the door. Brian’s dead fingers clutched at his father’s shoe like the probing feelers of an enormous insect, slipping off the worn leather and clutching again. Larry kicked them away, but Brian was persistent. The fingers returned and Larry brought the butt of the rifle down, snapping the small bones in his son’s hand until Brian could no longer use it, until it looked like a tarantula which has come across the losing side of a boot. Yet Brian bore this with silent determination: inching closer, ever closer, until Larry aimed higher and swung harder and broke his son’s collarbone with a sickening crunch.
At the same time, Jan won control of the doorknob and Larry suddenly found himself falling through darkness. He hit the thin pad of the basement carpet and galaxies erupted against the dim gray tiles overhead, threatening to swallow him whole. At the same instant, the rifle bounced out of his grasp, his wife pressed her hands to her face and screamed, and Larry felt the painful rake of the door against the meat of his calf as Mark sprang out of the shadows and forced it shut.
He sat up in darkness, the starlight fading, reaching for his gun, certain that Brian had crawled inside, but the rifle was yanked painfully out of his grasp. In the uncertain gloom, he imagined that Mark was pointing it at his head.
Sobbing, Mark collapsed into his mother’s outstretched arms.
And beneath the sound of their weeping, Larry heard the blind grope of broken fingers at the base of the door.
18
Mike nudged the two bodies back into the earth and tried not to linger on the sight: the desperate tangle of limbs, the shocking wounds, the heads that were no longer much like heads, but clay urns that had cracked under the pressure of a violent fermentation.
He was tempted to throw a blanket of dirt over them, if not bury them completely, but he knew they had more pressing matters to attend to. The dead;
“Did you hear a gunshot?” Rudy asked, sniffing as if a whiff of spent powder had just drifted past. The problem was that the whole day reeked of gunpowder. It was tangled in their hair, caught in their clothes, and embedded in the moist tissue of their sinuses.
Mike shrugged. “I’ve been hearing shots echo off the hills all day.”
“This wasn’t an echo. It was
Mike made a face. “I doubt that. Larry’s been shut up inside his house since we buried Bud.” At the mention
