Wormwood

is, indeed, actually happening. Larry, you seem to have a unique stance on all of this, so why don’t we start with you.”

“What’s the use? You all seem to have your minds made up against me.” His jaw shifted. “I didn’t come here to be shouted down or laughed at.”

“Then maybe you ought to explain your position more clearly,” Bud suggested. “Despite what we just saw on television, you maintain it’s a hoax. Can you tell us why you’re convinced of that?”

Larry Hanna looked at the faces of his neighbors; faces that he passed and waved to, day in and day out, for almost six years; all staring back at him now as if he’d suggested the Earth might really be flat after all. He considered walking out, wishing them luck in their grand paranoia, but the trouble with that was he couldn’t walk far. They were, after all, his neighbors; he couldn’t pick up his house and walk away with that as well.

So he sat down again, ready to receive the stones of their derision.

“I can’t accept that these are dead people, and that’s what it all comes down to,” he said with a sigh. “If death is no longer a reality — which, taxes aside, is the only real absolute we have — then where does that leave us?”

“Standing hip-deep in a pile of shit,” Keith Sturling said softly.

Larry ignored the remark, the root and depth of his distress becoming evident now. “Think about it,” he implored, looking at each of them in turn. “Where does it leave us? If that…” he pointed at the darkened TV screen, “is what waits for us after we die, what does that say about God?” He shook his head, angry. “That He’s abandoned us? That He’s stopped listening? I mean, what other conclusion can you come to?”

Rudy quietly cleared his throat. “You may be taking this, well…” — he hesitated, searching for words that wouldn’t offend or sound condescending — “too metaphysically. It’s shaky at best to start second-guessing God; assigning Him motives. From what I’ve gathered, this all started with a fallen defense satellite, which makes it more or less our doing. God had no part in it.”

“Oh, but He should,” Larry replied, the broken sadness in his eyes deep enough to drown in. “I’m not the kind of Christian who thinks God should step in and solve the world’s problems — make the Seahawks win on Sunday or tie a nice rainbow of peace around the Middle East — but this has to be an affront to Him. It has to be. If the walking dead don’t make Him sit up and take notice, He might as well be gone, or dead.”

He looked down at his hands, empty and useless.

“I can’t put my faith in a god like that.”

“So what do you intend to do?” Bud Iverson asked. “Fold up like a cheap suitcase and march Jan and the kids out to the street to be slaughtered? Is that any better than a lost faith?”

Larry put his head in his hands, shaking it slowly, vehemently, as if he still refused to believe he’d have to make such a choice. That buying plywood and .22 shells were tantamount to throwing 33 years worth of Sundays down the drain. “God help me, I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Larry,” Rudy said softly. “Listen to me. The issue of God aside, we may not have much time. Every hour, every minute that we sit here debating, the shelves at the hardware stores and the supermarkets are going to get thinner and thinner. People are going to see what’s happening back east and start to panic. Some of them will pack up their families and leave town, head out to less populated areas to try to get away from it, but most of us will probably stay in our homes and dig in.

“Now it’s my suggestion, for whatever it’s worth, that you take care of your wife and your two sons, take care of yourself, and let God worry about His own plans. It may be that He’ll surprise us all in the end — who’s to say? — but we’ll have to keep ourselves alive long enough to see it. There are more ways to commit suicide than pills or a gun to your head… sometimes just giving up is enough. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

Larry looked up soberly and nodded.

“Good.” Rudy picked up his lemonade and took a long drink, as if clearing his palate. He set the glass down and let his eyes roam over the faces of his neighbors. “Now what I’m proposing is simple enough: we pool our resources and protect one another’s backs, when and if this thing finally shows. We buy supplies — canned food, bottled water, guns and ammunition, whatever we need to get ourselves through this — and we stick together as a group to keep it from marching up Quail Street.”

“Look,” Keith Sturling spoke up, “I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but I just saw a U.S. Army base overrun with those things.” He glanced around the circle and came back to Rudy. “How do you expect to hold them off here, using rakes and shovels, when they couldn’t keep them out with an entire armory at their disposal?”

A murmur of assent greeted this. Don Navaro snubbed out his cigarette, nodding.

“He’s right. All I’ve got is an old shotgun and a hunting rifle. That’s not going to last long against a mob like that,” he said, gesturing toward the television.

Rudy held up his hands, palms open, as if surrendering. “Look,” he said, “I don’t pretend to know any more about this than you, but what I do know is I’m not going to give in without a fight. It may well be our fate to be overrun after firing a few futile shots, but I’ll go to whatever awaits me knowing I fired them. On the other hand,” he continued, “what we saw on television is just one perspective of what’s happening on that base.” He nodded at Keith. “How many men are inside that base that the helicopter can’t show us, holding their own against the attack?”

“I don’t know… a hundred, five hundred?” Sturling shrugged and conceded the point. “But how long can they hold out? And what’ve they got left to return to once it’s over?”

Bud rose to field that one, his tone snappish, impatient. “I don’t think all of you understand what’s happening here. This isn’t a choice between balling Miss America or winning the lottery, and choosing not to play isn’t an option. This disease, when it comes, isn’t going to play by any sense of fairness. It’s going to be ugly. It’s going to be death or survival, and if that weren’t bad enough, there seems to be a big gray area in the middle that sends you back to play for the other team once you’re dead, which means that if it happens to you, you’re going to be doing your level best to tear apart everything you’ve come to love and cherish. That means friends, family… maybe one or two of us as well. Get that through your goddamn heads. What Rudy’s talking about here is a choice between sticking together or going it alone. There are no odds or guarantees in that, but if it helps think about this: if by chance you do get infected, at least you know you’ve got someone beside you to put you back down; and from what I’ve seen, that’s no small blessing.”

Bud sat down, blew his nose into a handkerchief, and crossed his arms, his position well-apparent.

“I don’t think I can add much more to that,” Rudy conceded, gathering up a small stack of computer printouts: the map he’d drawn of the cul-de-sac and a list of supplies they’d need to make their stand against Wormwood, much of which he’d taken straight off a survivalist’s site on the internet. As no one got up to leave, he started passing them around the room, pausing when he came to the only member of the group who’d yet to voice an opinion or objection.

“Shane,” he said, hoping to encourage the teenager forward. “Is there anything you’d like to say? This is all uncharted territory, so I can promise we’re open to just about anything?”

Shane Dawley glanced uncomfortably at the men gathered around him, men who, up to now, he’d regarded as unfriendlies, trip-mines to be avoided much like policemen and school administrators. And he’d been happy to do just that. Sitting here amongst them, sipping lemonade in a bright corner of the rec room, made him feel uncomfortable, out of place, because the longer he sat with them, the closer he felt himself pulled toward an indefinable line. A line which divided a great many things: inclusion and exclusion, responsibility and indifference, childhood and maturity?

He sensed that he might soon cross that line, and any hint or suggestion of participation on his part would only hurry him toward it, and that scared him.

It scared him almost as much as the reports on TV.

With all of them looking at him he felt he had to say something, yet, strangely enough, it was his father who was foremost in his thoughts — his father who should have been sitting here where he was, conversing with these