Wormwood

unseen blow from above and his mouth seemed to exhale from the force of it. His face froze, slackened, then all the tension went out of him like a raft quickly deflating.

A thin strand of something that might have been blood began to descend from his mouth and Shane pitched the corpse aside. It rolled over into the dust with the grip of Larry’s own knife protruding from the back of its skull.

Shane was on his feet again in an instant, wiping frantically at his face for fear that some of the boy’s fluids might have splattered on him. There was a dead woman in his shadow, face-down in the dirt with a pair of stained bicycle shorts stretched over the ponderous width of her thighs.

“Are you all right?” Larry asked, sparing Shane the briefest of glances before taking a shot at an approaching state trooper: a man so badly mutilated that, aside from knocking him down, there was no way of telling where the bullet impacted.

“I think so,” Shane replied, then a bright note of panic asserted itself. “I don’t know!” He looked at his hands and saw a faint smear of something that might have issued from the boy, though he himself was oozing blood from several places: shallow cuts and abrasions sustained during his abrupt dismount and fall. He had no concussion or broken bones, he could walk or run if he had to… but was he all right? Had something irreversible been passed to him from the boy? It was a chilling thought, and his first impulse was to run straight to the river — winding its usual course, 50 or 60 yards away, completely unaffected by recent events — and scrub himself clean with both hands. At the same time, however, he knew such measures were useless. If the disease was in him, then it was in him, and all the water in the world wasn’t going to help. The antibiotics they were after might (he had to believe so for his father’s sake), but the truth was no one knew how Wormwood traveled or what affect it had upon the living. He would either get sick and die or go on living. It was an uncertainty he was going to have to get used to.

Meanwhile, the state trooper was slowly getting up again.

“Find your guns,” Larry advised and stepped forward to put his last chamber into the man’s forehead.

Shane looked up from his hands. More shapes were lurching eagerly down the embankment: slowly or not so slowly, depending on their condition.

“Make it quick!” Larry snapped, reloading his gun. “I’ll get the bike started.”

Shane started pacing the area, finding the shotgun almost immediately, but having more difficulty with his dad’s 9mm. When one of the gruesome shapes got too close he took a step back and shot it in the head, by luck finding his lost pistol underfoot, hiding in a patch of goldenrod.

He snatched it up and ran toward Larry.

24

So in fits and stops, in gunfire and frustration, they searched for a gap wide enough to maneuver the bike across the westbound lanes, finding one at last half a mile from where they’d come out of Brace.

For the most part the cars they’d passed had been abandoned, discarded when they’d become mired in the gridlock, but there were still nightmares to be found, enough to spawn a dark city of dreams.

Some were bloody, torn to pieces and buzzing with flies. Unrecognizable.

Others were trapped in a kind of limbo or purgatory inside their cars, blocked by the proximity of neighboring vehicles or because they were too young to have ever worked a lock or a door handle. Infants and toddlers still buckled into their boosters and car seats, their plump hands slapping angrily at the glass, smearing it, wanting to be let out. Their heads loomed, swollen and bruised looking, like overripe fruit.

The rest wandered amongst the fields and along the highway — amnesiatic travelers who no longer remembered where they were going or where they’d come from — excited by the bright movement of the motorcycle, but unable to cross or negotiate the solid maze of stalled vehicles.

At one point, not long before they found the gap, Larry braked abruptly beside the flank of a smashed blue Corolla, no different in Shane’s eyes than any of the other vehicles they’d passed. Two adult figures, bloody and broken, lay slumped in the front seat while two teenaged girls scratched and clawed in the back, agitated by bike’s proximity. Larry pulled his revolver from its holster and emptied it into the interior.

When the gun stopped firing, the girls lay in silent tangles.

“What did you do that for?” Shane asked, aghast at the senseless waste of ammunition.

Larry reloaded the gun. “I knew them,” he said, his voice haunted and hollow, his fingers trembling as he fit fresh bullets, one by one, into the warm cylinder. “Dick and Shauna Masterson… their daughters Tammy and Tina.” He closed the revolver and put it back in its holster. “They belonged to our church. I’ve known them since the girls were in kindergarten.”

Shane nodded, not sure what to say.

Larry shook his head as if trying to clear it of a lingering fog, an unsettling dream in which he’d gunned down two young girls for reasons he could no longer recall. “This is not at all what I had in mind,” he said aloud, cryptically, and with a measure of doubt. The same Larry that Shane had seen walk distractedly out of his house that morning.

Shane was about to ask him what he meant, but before he could Larry’s hands settled on the grips and they were off again.

25

They crossed the highway in front of a Greyhound bus that had turned on its side and slid across both westbound lanes. There was evidence of collision, a mass of scorched metal joined to its undercarriage, but the bus had held its ground, quietly burning then guttering where it lay. It offered them a gap of 3 or 4 feet where traffic had streamed around it then tried to get back on the roadway, some having more luck at this than others.

Larry and Shane paused to look inside the Greyhound’s shattered front window, though what they saw huddled in the back was unclear. It moved, however. To Shane it looked like a giant spider, its many arms and legs poised and trembling, ready to strike if they wandered too near. To Larry, it was simply a bloody and writhing mass, as if all the passengers had been ground into hamburger and were slowly reassembling themselves into a form that might one day hope to crawl.

The smell, charred and oily, yet at the same time redolent of a backyard barbeque, reminded them how long it had been since they’d last eaten. This was an uneasy thought and they hurried past as if it had been whispered with a sly grin from one of the shattered windows.

26

The eastbound lanes, by contrast, were relatively clear and allowed them to make quick progress to the Autumn Creek exit, traveling at times up to 35 mph and speeding past most of the situations they’d had to use a gun for beyond the opposite lanes.

The short spur spanning the swollen river and linking Highway 12 with Autumn Creek Road was even better, and once they crossed the river they were able to take something of a breather, breaking food out of the improvised saddlebags of their backpacks and filling their pockets from the dwindling supply of ammunition. They found, with dismay, that of the 100 or so rounds they’d left with, over half were already gone, and there was still the return trip to consider.

“Maybe Fred Meyer carries ammunition with its sporting goods,” Shane said, his voice cautiously optimistic. “Places like that, they usually sell it out of a locked display case.”

Larry smiled wanly. “Maybe we’ll find a sales clerk to unlock it for us.”

Shane shrugged and looked downriver, at a tangle of driftwood piled up on the rocky shallows of the north