Wormwood

“Wait a minute,” Rudy said, pointing toward the sink. “What’s that?”

Mike turned and bounced the light off the mirror, illuminating a towel bar on the opposite wall whose neat arrangement stood in gross counterpoint to the blood and chaos that had chewed up the rest of the room. Mike gazed at its reflection with a mixture of longing and fascination, as if the overlay of washcloths on towels were already a lost art. A fossilized piece of the past deemed useless and hastily buried while they were busy shooting their neighbors.

“A little higher,” Rudy nudged and Mike raised the beam another foot, wondering what else would become quietly obsolete in the devastating wake of Wormwood.

He saw what Rudy was looking at and frowned. “What is that, a bullet hole?”

A second splash of blood on the mirror — like an isolated island, well away from Naomi, — and a sharp chip along the beveled edge, punctuated by a black period. It seemed to speak for itself. When Mike focused the flashlight on the stain, the room took on a pinkish tinge. He glanced down at Naomi, certain her eyes had shifted with the light, and looked back at the mirror.

Rudy’s reflection looked deeply worried.

“What are you thinking?” Mike asked, afraid he already knew the answer. The blood on the floor was beginning to creep him out. He was afraid to move for fear he’d step in it.

Rudy’s eyes met his in the mirror. “I’m thinking that it would be difficult for a man to miss his target in a room like this, especially a trained soldier.”

“You’re afraid he tried to kill himself,” Mike said numbly, his heart thumping sickly in his chest.

Rudy nodded. “I’m afraid he may have succeeded.”

“If he shot himself, where’s the body?”

Rudy hesitated. “He may not have been as successful as he would have liked.”

Mike uttered a bleak, harsh-sounding laugh and glanced down at Naomi, thinking now there was a success story. He had to bite his lip to keep from falling into the insanity of it. Pretty soon they’d be tallying up the dead in strikes and spares, just like in bowling.

He turned the flashlight at the door, no longer interested in the bathroom but what may have staggered out into the dark. “I think we ought to rethink this,” he said, the shotgun trembling behind the beam, ready to blast anything that appeared in the doorway. “Go back outside and pry some of these boards off the windows.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Rudy agreed, though neither of them moved. Since stepping into the bathroom, a fearful paralysis had settled over them, stiffening their joints and making it difficult to leave. The small room, awful as it was, was safe so long as they had their guns. There was only the one door to defend, whereas if they stepped back into the hall they’d be vulnerable again.

“Do you want me to lead the way?” Rudy volunteered.

Yes, Mike wanted to say. Yes I do. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Rudy had already taken over for him in a moment of weakness in the Navaro’s nursery; he couldn’t very well do that to him again; besides, he didn’t want to give up the penlight.

“No,” Mike replied, forcing himself forward. “I’ll do it.” He stepped carefully over a puddle of blood and paused at the threshold, pointing the beam first left and then right. The house looked as empty as when they’d entered.

Goddamnit Keith, where are you?

Leaving Naomi and the bathroom, they crept past the spare room with its museum stillness and its thin layer of dust. Mike led the way, hugging the clean right wall with his shotgun pointed ahead, hip to hip with Rudy who was covering the dark places behind them. They moved slowly, like a four-legged beast, well-armed and dangerous if surprised.

Which was just what happened — four paces into the living room Keith came gliding out of the woodwork, covered with blood and grim as Death. Mike shrieked, jerked the shotgun at the nightmarish apparition and the thing went off, sending a flickering tongue of flame across the room. Keith (if he’d ever really been there) dropped instantly from sight, like a paper bag swatted from a darkened stage.

In the ringing silence that followed, Mike was not only certain Keith had been there, but that a look of surprise had crossed his face.

Surprise being a human reaction…

Which, if so, might just make him a murderer.

24

Huddled within the concrete walls of the bomb shelter, the Hannas could no longer hear the gunshots echoing off the walls from house to house. Larry had come back down the stairs, set aside his rifle and the spare box of ammunition, and with a bitter look of finality on his face, wrestled the door shut, locking them in.

“Where’s Brian?” Jan asked, only now growing concerned, apparently under the impression that Larry had gone out to rescue him. That, like Mark, he’d been hiding in the juniper bushes when Quail Street began to fall apart. Her concern quickly blossomed into panic when she looked into her husband’s eyes.

“Larry? What did you do with Brian?”

He looked at her flatly and said, “Brian’s dead.”

“Zack ate Brian,” Mark said hollowly, then shuddered against her breast.

The panic receded and a look of confusion took its place. Jan opened her mouth as if to smile, to tell them that it wasn’t a very funny joke, then shut her mouth uncertainly, glancing between Larry and the dark steel panel of the door.

“What do you mean, he’s dead?”

Larry Hanna looked hard at his wife, as if only now realizing that he’d locked himself in with a tiger, one that was just now starting to sharpen her claws. “I mean we lost him,” he told her, trying to keep his voice low and under control. “He came down with Wormwood and I had to put him down.”

Now the smile came out, hideous in the harsh white glow of the battery-powered lantern.

“Larry. Don’t be ridiculous. Open the door and let me see my baby.”

“Jan,” he said softly. “Brian is…” Dead, he meant to tell her, but something in her eyes stopped him: a glimmer far back that warned he’d said enough, that she knew he was dead. Knew it as well as he did, but wouldn’t accept it. It wasn’t stubbornness, it wasn’t a mistake… she’d seen what was on the other side of the basement door and had spent the time he was upstairs erasing it. Sketching something else in Brian’s place. Otherwise, she would have been at the shelter door, opening it herself.

In that moment, Larry understood an unhappy truth: that he could clutch his family close to him, but he couldn’t save them. The fires of Hell and damnation were burning all around them, inside the reinforced shelter as well as Philadelphia or Chicago. He’d been a fool to believe otherwise.

He realized that he didn’t want to die this way.

He didn’t want to die like Brian either, but here, cowering in the ground, it was somehow worse, as if they were already dead. And when he tried to imagine the possible outcomes, all he could see was one subtracted from three then subtracted once again from two, leaving him locked away with a rifle that would turn suicide into an unpredictable gambit. Further on, he saw his skin turning sallow and gray as death finally overwhelmed him, sealing him inside this artificial tomb, no longer able to understand the complicated latchings of the door. Reduced to a ceaseless and pathetic scratching…

Which no one would ever hear, much less answer.

Larry shuddered. He gazed across the vault at his wife and son.

No, he finally decided, this was no way to die.

25

“Mike! Be careful!” Rudy cried, but in the time it took to shout the warning, it was already too late. Mike was