Wormwood

fleshy, insistent sort of pounding and exploration began against the glass. Smeary fingers touched and withdrew as dead eyes looked in at them longingly, as if they needed to walk and browse amongst the familiar aisles as much as they needed to pass on their disease.

Shane and Larry gazed back at them, taking in their slack (though not expressionless) faces. It was a brief opportunity to observe the enemy close up, in relative safety, without the notched sight of a gun barrel wavering in-between. What they found, however, was not enlightenment, but a grim sense of destiny, as if the one thing that separated them from the contagion outside was not a thin sheet of glass, but something much more tentative. A capricious whim of Fate.

Decaying hands and faces slid stubbornly against the glass, distorting their appearance even further.

One day, those faces insisted, your luck will fail.

Tomorrow, a week… or perhaps only a few moments from now.

You will fall, they whispered, and this will be the result.

A voice called out behind them. “Richard?”

Rachel was poised beside the checkout counter, on tiptoes staring into the vast and darkened cavern of the store, gazing into its depths as if it were a subterranean lake, filled with strange creatures that might be staring back at her.

She raised her voice. “Richard? Are you there?”

Beneath the beating of their own hearts, Shane and Larry could hear things moving about, lost within the sightless maze of aisles. Not a multitude, but enough that they could expect to meet a few unfriendly faces. The sound of Rachel’s voice seemed to stir them, to draw them from their quiet reveries.

Alarmed at the sight of a gaunt, acne-scarred face materializing out of the gloom, legs beneath it slowly shuffling, Larry unholstered his gun and asked her what she thought she was doing.

“My husband’s in here!” she hissed, wearing a pinched expression, as if she’d begun to resent him as much as he resented her.

“If he’s here, we’ll find him,” Larry assured her, then added (quite unnecessarily), “or he’ll find us.”

Shane, ignoring the both of them, set his shotgun on the checkout conveyor and faded toward an aisle filled with twilight and long wooden handles. He paused a moment, considering the inventory, then took down an axe — a sharp, grim-looking specimen that made Rachel’s mouth gape in disbelief.

“What are you doing with that? You’ve got guns, don’t you?”

Shane shook his head. “I’ll use the guns on my way back home; I’ll need the bullets then.” He hefted the axe. “In here, I’ll use this.”

“Oh my God!” she cried, her face blanching. “I can’t watch you chop up those… those things with that!”

“Do whatever you like,” Shane invited, quietly dismissing her. He turned to Larry. “How do I get to the pharmacy?”

“Now just a minute,” Larry protested, his face red, exasperated. He glanced at the dead man — within fifty feet of them now — uncertain whether or not to waste a bullet. “I’ll tell you where it is, but it’s stupid to split up now! We ought to stick together, that way we can watch each other’s back.”

“All right,” Shane nodded, conceding the point. “Let’s go then.”

“What about me?” Rachel objected, standing empty-handed by the cash register.

“Find something to protect yourself,” Larry advised, holstering his revolver and drifting toward a shelf stacked with steel fence posts, the sort generally used to string barbed-wire.

Glancing around the checkout counter, Rachel saw nothing but outdated magazines and minty packets of gum.

“Like what?” she wondered.

“Whatever you can handle,” Larry replied, sliding out one of the posts. It had a point like an oversized arrowhead: dull, flat and green, ready-made to drive into the ground. “Look over by Shane for a pry-bar or a good, solid hammer.”

Rachel shuddered. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“Why not? You didn’t have a problem with those clay pots.”

“That was different,” she said sullenly. “Those were blunt.”

“So’s a hammer.”

“Not blunt enough,” she said, shaking her head.

Larry shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He tested the weight of the post, hefting it in the palm of his hand, balancing it like a javelin. “Maybe you can find yourself a cast-iron frying pan in Housewares, or a marble rolling pin.”

The dead man was closing, tottering around a pyramidal paint display to within 10 or 12 yards of the registers. He began to moan eagerly, his arms outstretched, climbing through the stale air.

The steel post poised at his shoulder, Larry took a few running steps and hurled it through the man’s skull with a savage grunt. The sound it made as it passed through his eye socket and into the fevered meat of his brain was crisp, like an apple bite. A faint spray of blood fanned across the aisle and the paint display swallowed him whole, the fence post jutting out of the fallen mound like a victory spike or a flagpole. A miniature Iwo Jima.

“Can we go now?” Shane asked, his tone impatient and unimpressed.

2

The pharmacy counter was near the back of the store, sandwiched between Housewares and the magazine display. From where they stood (on the fringes of Lawn and Garden) they would have to travel through the forgotten lands of Hardware, Home Improvement, Sporting Goods, and finally Housewares before reaching the pharmacy.

“We can go about this a couple different ways, Larry said, extending a pointing finger toward the back of the store, toward a darkness that was more complete than in any other direction. “Straight back that way and along the back wall, or…” — he gestured to a wide aisle that traversed the entire width of the store like a wax-buffed interstate — “down that way, and then back.”

“What does it matter?” Rachel asked, a malletlike hammer in her hands, the head smothered nervously in her palm. “Just pick a direction and go.”

Larry looked at her, a fresh fence post propped against his shoulder. “Standing here, it doesn’t make a bit of difference,” he said, annoyed at being challenged by her at every step, “but if we get into trouble, it might be nice to have something useful near at hand. Something sharp or heavy.” He tipped his head toward the dark quarter. “If we go that way, we’re more likely to find items of that nature. If we go the other…” he shrugged. “Who knows? We may find nothing on the shelves but greeting cards and tampons.”

Rachel smiled sardonically and shook her head. “Greeting cards, yes, but I guarantee you’re not going to find any tampons in this store. Not this one or any other.”

Larry opened his mouth to say something, then promptly shut it, flustered and embarrassed, waving the point aside as inconsequential. “It doesn’t matter. If we go down the center aisle we’re more open to ambush; if we go across the back, we’ve at least got the wall to one side.” He hesitated. “Plus, I’m not exactly certain where to cut back to get to the pharmacy.”

Rachel sighed. “Well why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”

3

The small penlights they’d brought were not up to the task of illuminating the aisles, at least not in a manner