Wormwood

neighbor Larry and myself. We came here to get some antibiotics.”

Again, an indecisive rustle. “What’s your name?”

“Shane,” he answered, wondering what difference it made. The chance that they might know one another was laughable. “Shane Dawley.”

“Do you really have a gun, Shane?” the voice asked. It sounded almost hopeful.

“Yes.”

“A gun with bullets?”

Shane frowned. “Yes.”

The next sound he heard was a metallic click, the lock disengaging.

Then the door creaked open.

17

The office was full of candles, at least a dozen of them blazing away, creating a glow that was almost blinding after bumping about the aisles with their penlights. Shane dragged Larry in by his ankles then the door clicked shut behind them. Larry’s eyes glanced mistrustfully about, as if the sound were the subtle springing of a trap.

“What’s the matter with him?” A girl moved out of the corner, her eyes on Larry. Something in her expression seemed to curdle, as if he were a dead dog Shane had drug into her parlor.

Shane’s eyes narrowed, looking her over before answering. She was young, plain, and perhaps only a few years older than he was; hardly dangerous by any stretch of the imagination, yet there was something about her that seemed unstable and bent. Like a chair or spindle-legged stool on the verge of collapse, wanting only the pressure of someone sitting down to snap.

“He was attacked by a woman outside the pharmacy.”

“One of the dead ones, you mean,” she corrected, her lips thin, frowning, as if he were trying to pull one over on her.

Shane nodded. He slipped off his backpack and untied the knot in the grocery bag around his belt loop. “Do you have any first aid supplies?” he asked, kneeling down beside Larry. When she failed to reply he glanced up, again getting the impression of something twisted and strained. Her eyes had been on his holster; now they switched to him. Shane repeated his question and she shrugged it off as if the idea had never occurred to her.

He sighed. “What’s your name?”

A vertical line appeared between her eyebrows. “Melinda.”

Shane nodded. “All right, Melinda. Do you have any clean water?”

“What for?” she wanted to know, glancing suspiciously between Shane and Larry.

“I want to rinse out his wound before I dress it,” he answered, his voice a mixture of annoyance and fatigue.

Her eyes narrowed critically, taking in Larry, the arm that hung limply beneath the cinched belt. “It won’t matter,” she pronounced. “He’s going to die anyway.”

“Look,” Shane objected, getting to his feet now to face her. “You’re not helping.  He really doesn’t need to hear that kind of shit, all right? Now have you got water or not?”

She smiled, as if the two of them had joined her in a game; one that she’d been playing by herself up until now. “Maybe,” she replied, standing with her hand on the manager’s desk, her fingers drawing slow shapes in the dust. “I’ll tell you if you’ll promise me something in return?”

Shane stared at her, his lips pressed firmly together, as if he was afraid he’d say something he’d regret. He looked at her face, dull and unappealing, even in candlelight: old acne scars casting pitted shadows on her cheeks, hair hanging lifeless and lank, her eyes flickering back at him like those of a pig, though gleaming with a dumb sort of cunning. He imagined that she would want sex; that he would have to fuck her for a goddamn jug of water.

“All right,” he agreed, grinding his molars. “What do you want?”

Coyly, she hesitated, as if she didn’t know how to ask him, how to put her lust into words.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she finally said, looking hopefully into his eyes.

Oh God, Shane thought, reading her eyes and silently groaning. She wanted to go back with them; just as Rachel had; back to Quail Street! He shook his head, the very notion — on top of all they’d gone through just to get here — too much to even consider.

“We can’t take you with us,” he replied, his voice stiff and inflexible. “We got here by motorcycle. There’s only room on it for two.”

Unexpectedly, Melinda laughed in his face. It was a coarse, ugly bray; perhaps she realized this because she clapped a hand over it, stuffing it back in her mouth with fat, grubby fingers. When the better part of it had passed, she shook her head and told him he’d misunderstood.

“There’s nowhere you can go to get away from this!” She laughed again, this time sounding bitter. Bent, Shane thought again, like a voice laughing in a cottage buried deep within the woods. “I don’t want to come with you…” she said contemptuously, almost spitting the words now, her eyes shining deeply. “I want you to kill me! I want you to shoot me in the head so I don’t have to live anymore!”

Shane felt his mouth drop open, stunned by the earnestness of her laughter, which seemed to bubble out and embrace the notion of guns and bullets like frilly party favors. He closed his mouth and felt it fall open again, unable to think of a word to say.

“Will you promise me?” she implored. “No matter what, will you swear to God to put a bullet in my head?”

Shane took an unconscious step back, a stammering question — Why? — on his lips, but before he could voice it there came a hoarse and gurgling chuckle. He glanced down, but Larry’s eyes were on Melinda, as if his neighbor had a much better perspective from his position on the floor. As if he could look inside her mind and read her thoughts as if they were simple lines in a book.

“Don’t ask God for help,” he told her, his face creased with pain or bitterness, or both. “Don’t bother to swear by Him either, because God’s not here. He’s not listening.”

Larry studied Melinda’s face, recognized what he saw there, and nodded. “It’s a problem, isn’t it, finding a way to kill yourself so you don’t come back as Wormwood? I’ve been thinking about it myself; most of the day, in fact.” He reached his good arm toward his holster, as if assuring himself it was still there. “The disease lives in the brain, and destroying the brain is the only sure way of getting rid of it.” He looked at Shane and then back at Melinda, whose eyes were locked on the revolver, as if she’d been dreaming of just such a thing. “It’s easy if you have a gun… but you don’t have a gun, do you? That makes it hard to be certain.”

“I looked all over the store for one!” she cried, her hands turning to fists, useless lumps of flesh and bone. “I looked and I looked but they’re all gone! Even the BB pistols! They’ve all been stolen, along with the bullets! All by people like you!” She glared hatefully at them, as if they carried the keys to Heaven and didn’t even know it.

The anger in her seemed to pass through the room like a hot wind, one that whipped and stirred the candles and then died away, spent. Her head down, shoulders slumped, she opened one of the desk drawers and pulled out a knife. Its blade was long and sharp, made for chopping things in the kitchen. Her fingers flirted along its bright factory edge.

“I found this yesterday,” she told them, her voice sleepy, far away, as if the flashing steel had a hypnotic power over her. “I found it and brought it back here and put the point against my forehead, but I couldn’t make myself push it through.” This fact seemed to agitate her. “I thought about it and tried to make myself do it, but what if it didn’t work? The blade’s long, but it’s so thin… and what if I missed the right place? What if I shoved it in and it didn’t go where it was supposed to, or didn’t go deep enough?” She shook her head and frowned. “I’d be worse off than I was before. And it seemed,” — her lip trembled — “it seemed such a