Wormwood

yarmulke-sized divot had been taken out of the back. As he noticed this, a dark stain began to spread around her like a halo, dampening her hair and lapping at the pale stalk of her neck.

This was confirmation enough for Shane. He put down his heels and reholstered his gun.

“Must have been a reflex,” he murmured, dismissing her and shining his light at the inky gloom beyond the ATM and the lottery ticket dispenser, trying to plot out his next 30 or 40 steps. There was a faint, squarish suggestion of an opening, possibly a corridor leading back to the manager’s office or possibly his imagination drawing shapes against a smooth blank wall.

Whichever, nothing better suggested itself.

He clipped the penlight back to his collar and squatted beside Larry. His neighbor seemed to be drifting again, his gun resting on his chest, his face a pale mask left lying on the floor.

“Whassut,” he said thickly as Shane took the gun out of his hand and snugged it back in his holster.

“Almost there,” Shane assured him, quickly gathering up the things Larry had dropped and depositing them in a plastic grocery bag. He tied the bag to one of his belt loops and, as Larry’s eyes sank back toward unconsciousness, rearranged his neighbor’s arms to better negotiate the narrow checkout aisle.

Satisfied, he got to his feet and looked around. Through the high windows, the twilight had faded and true night was gazing in at them. To the right, past the last registers and the latte stand, things were bumping against the locked doors. Gray smudges pawing softly against the glass.

Shane turned away, hoping their numbers didn’t multiply during the night, and pointed his light at the dim wall beyond the ATM. Real or imaginary, the shape was still there, waiting for them.

He picked up Larry’s legs and began to drag him toward it.

15

A sign materialized.

RESTROOMS, it pointed, and Shane uttered a long sigh. He looked down the corridor and the polished steel of a drinking fountain winked back, as if pleased to see him. A second sign — smaller and more discouraging — indicated that the manager’s office was near.

Shane grinned. “Found it!” he whispered and Larry stirred slightly against the tiles, just enough to assure them both he wasn’t dead.

Shane pulled him past the drinking fountain and a wide gap appeared directly opposite, reserved for EMPLOYEES ONLY. Curious, Shane stopped long enough to look inside.

It had once been a break room or employee lounge, furnished with tables and darkened vending machines, now utterly silent. A man sat at one of the far tables, his head cradled in his arms, a large amount of congealed blood pooled on the floor around him, as if he had slit his wrists and then curled up to sleep. There were shotgun holes blasted in the walls and through one of the vending machines. Nearer to the door, a pair of legs and a slack white arm protruded from an overturned trash barrel.

Nothing much of interest, though the concentration of smells — the blood, the bodies, the food in the dispensers gone bad — was much worse than the rest of the store.

Shane let the light swing from his shirt and trudged onward, pulling Larry toward a T-shaped junction. A door marked MEN stood soberly against the painted plaster, its blonde wood dully gleaming; another chamber of horrors to be opened and stared down, though not just yet.

Shane halted at the junction and probed his options with the penlight. To the left he found the ladies room; to the right a set of double-doors also marked EMPLOYEES ONLY; and further on, like a mirage shimmering at the edge of a dream, one marked MANAGER.

16

It was locked, of course; the location of the key anyone’s guess.

Shane thought of the man in the break room and wondered if he might have them, the ring tangled in the sodden folds of his pocket. Briefly, he considered walking back and fishing for them, then a dark shudder passed through him. If that were the case, Shane thought, he could keep them; better to simply use the axe. True, it would ruin the lock, but there were likely heavy things within the office that could be persuaded to stand guard over them while they slept: a good-sized desk or a loaded set of file cabinets pushed up against the door as a barricade.

He looked at Larry and picked up the axe, holding it loosely, near the head.

Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.

Jack Nicholson’s voice, grinning beside him in the dark.

Shane took a step back, gripping the axe with both hands, though choking up on it, wanting only to knock off the steel doorknob, not destroy the integrity of the door itself. The knob floated just outside the cone of his light, like a planet: a silvery crescent drifting along the cusp of twilight. Shane positioned the butt-end of the blade a foot or two over it, dropping it down sharply when he felt confident of his mark. It glanced away, leaving a bright nick in the polished steel and a numb tingle in his bones.

He tried again, harder this time, and a scream sounded behind the door, startling him. Larry flinched in the darkness behind him, coming back to life with a jerk.

“Where are we?” he gasped, his face slick with perspiration, his eyes two feverish moons.

“Outside the manager’s office,” Shane answered. “The door’s locked and there’s someone inside.”

“Who?” Larry whispered, suddenly terrified of what they might let out.

“I don’t know, but it sounds like a woman; she’s still alive,” Shane added.

Larry seemed to breathe a little easier. “Be careful,” he hissed, his good hand reaching blindly for his gun.

Shane nodded and raised a hand, rapping his knuckles lightly on the door.

“Hello?”

There was no answer, but Shane thought he heard movement. A thin scrape in the dark.

He knocked again, more insistently this time.

“Hello?” he called, not wanting to shout but needing to convey their urgency. “Open the door, please. I’ve got an injured man out here.” He paused a heartbeat or two to listen. “We don’t mean you any harm.”

Good, he thought, shaking his head stupidly. Famous last words. We come in peace.

He knocked again, this time with the head of the axe. “Please,” he emphasized. “I’ve got an axe and I’ve got a gun. I can knock it down if I have to, but that won’t do either of us any good.”

Silence, unbroken by even a scrape this time.

Shane sighed and readjusted his grip on the axe. As he raised it to take another chop at the doorknob, a voice issued through the wood, little more than a faint whisper to his ear.

“What do you want?” it asked; tentative and frightened. A woman’s voice. “You’ve got the whole store. Just take what you want and leave.”

Shane glanced at Larry, lying quietly on the floor behind him, his head raised, listening. “We can’t leave until dawn,” Shane explained. “The store’s not secure.”

Silence, considering.

“Look,” Shane reasoned, a splinter of irritation in his voice now, “we just want a place to spend the night and patch ourselves up. It’s been…” — he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cool finish of the wood, suddenly weary — “It’s been a long day.”

There came a noise from the other side of the door. Muffled, like clothes rustling, or moth wings batting softly against the other side.

“How many of you are there?” the voice inquired.

“Two,” Shane told her, hoping that didn’t sound like much of a threat. “My