Wormwood

9

Shane stopped swinging the hammer; he tilted his head to listen. There came a heavy click inside the wall: the sound of the Earth itself unlocking some long-buried secret. In that instant a dreadful certainty stole over him — that the shelter ought to remain sealed, that it contained nothing but sorrows — but as the thick door swung open he realized such thoughts and considerations had arrived a moment too late.

A hand appeared, struggling with the weight of the door, and then Shane found himself gazing back at a haggard and distraught-looking Rudy Cheng. Rudy’s eyes seemed to take a terribly long time to focus, and then recognition dawned.

“Shane,” he whispered, his voice stripped and splintered. “My God… is it really you?”

Light from a battery-powered lantern cast a harsh white glow over the walls behind him; bright enough to see that Rudy was alone in the shelter. The words FORGIVE ME were scratched into the facing wall in what looked like dried blood. Shane saw that Rudy’s hair had gone gray in parts, as if patches of him were already dying. The room itself stank of waste and desperation, strong enough for Shane to realize that he couldn’t go inside; that it was no longer a shelter; a cell, a madhouse, perhaps… a 10 by 10 foot crypt, but not a place for the living or the sane. Rudy Cheng was walking proof of that.

“Mr. Cheng, Rudy…” Shane intoned, gazing into the man’s haunted eyes. “My parents… where are they?”

A slight tremor shook Rudy’s jaw. “They’re dead, Shane. I, I’m sorry.”

All the breath seemed to leave Shane’s body. His mouth moved, he tried to form words… but there was something enormous in the way. He thought he’d prepared himself for this as well.

“They died the same day that you and Larry left,” Rudy went on, his eyes wandering around the shelter as he filled in the horrible details. “I spoke to your mother later that afternoon and she told me that your father had taken a bad turn, that the infection was spreading through him like a poison, and she feared that he wouldn’t make it through the night. She seemed resigned to this as a certainty, though I suggested there might still be some time. That you and Larry might still find the means to save him, but she shook her head. ‘The disease is too strong,’ she said, her eyes dark and exhausted. ‘Even if the medicine had been here all along, it wouldn’t have stopped it. It might have prolonged his suffering by a day or two, but it wouldn’t have saved him. It won’t save any of us.’”

Shane shook his head as if he couldn’t accept this. His trip couldn’t have been for nothing.

“She wanted me to give you something,” Rudy remembered, reaching into his back pocket, his trembling hand coming out with a folded envelope, the gummed flap still sealed. He gave it to Shane with an air of relief, as if a great responsibility had been taken from his shoulders. Shane unfolded it, finding his name in his mother’s handwriting looped across the creases. As Rudy finished what little there was left to tell, Shane tore it open.

“After she handed that to me, she went back inside to sit with your father. About an hour later, after dark, the two of them came outside… I saw them in the moonlight. They were… they were both infected.”

“Oh Shane,” Marie said, her voice heavy with sympathy as she reached out to touch him.

Tears spattered across the face of the note.

Dear, dear son, it began.

10

The two of them lay together on Marie’s narrow bed, the heat from their lovemaking cooling now, soaking into the creaking timbers of the house.

“Shane?” Marie whispered, wondering if he’d fallen asleep, his head heavy on her breast.

Sluggishly he stirred. “Hmm.”

The candle on the nightstand stuttered, the blackened wick hissing in a pool of wax.

“When you leave tomorrow, will you take me with you?”

He opened his eyes and lifted his head, surprised. “What about your dad?”

A pained expression passed over her face, like the shadow of a bird, one that she made an effort to shoo away, though it left a tear trailing down her cheek. “I think…” — she wiped the tear away — “I think that if he could have come back, he would have been here by now. I think…” — again she stumbled, clearly having trouble declaring him dead — “that if he couldn’t make it back, he would have wanted me to find someone like you.”

She broke down crying and Shane took her in his arms, letting the poison and the tremors pass through him and out toward the shadow-laden corners of the room, like ripples in a summer pond. And when she had quieted enough to hear him, Shane kissed her face and whispered in her ear that of course, of course she could come with him, if that was what she wanted. He had only been thinking of a way to ask.

She started to cry all over again, only this time her tears weren’t bitter.

They made love again before sleep came — insistent in its calling — and when she hesitantly told him that she wasn’t using birth control, Shane laughed softly in the flickering light.

“That’s all right,” he said, his hand on the warm curve of her thigh. “The way things are, the idea of birth control seems a little silly, doesn’t it? Like spitting in the face of God.”

Marie hugged him closer, more confident than ever in her decision

By the time the candle sputtered and drowned, they were asleep in each other’s arms.

11

“What about the fire?” Shane asked, and this seemed to cause Rudy more pain than having to tell him about his parents; a devastating pain that couldn’t be shrugged off with the delivery of a good-bye note.

“I set fire to my own house,” Rudy admitted and these words cut his insides like a tangle of thorns that he could neither pass nor digest.

“Why?” Shane asked, his voice quiet but insistent, causing Rudy’s face to crumple in on itself like a useless wad of paper. He made a choked sound and two long tears crept out of the creases beneath his glasses.

“Because I’m a coward!” Rudy cried, the thick green venom, the bitter self-hatred bubbling out of him freely now. “Because I was too weak to shoot my own family!”

Shane took an unconscious step back as if Rudy might explode, splattering everything in the stairwell with a powerful corrosive.

“Aimee and I were sleeping because I’d been up most of the night… and a man, a man came to the door in a Federal Express uniform. One of the kids… either John or Denise must have let him in because he, he… he killed them both before Aimee and I even knew he was in the house!”

Shane shook his head, a prophetic chill creeping slowly up the back of his neck. Filed neatly away in his memory, he saw a white Fed-Ex van overturned in a weedy ditch, the motorbike veering to give it a wide berth, he and Larry having just set out from Quail Street. The dead driver appeared around the next bend and Shane had put the grisly aberration squarely in his sights… but he hadn’t pulled the trigger. The man was easily bypassed and they hadn’t brought enough ammunition to shoot indiscriminately.

Now here was the result: a man’s entire family dead. Shane wanted to clap his hands over his ears, but Rudy kept right on sobbing.

“I, I shot him in the living room… then I took my son and daughter out to the street and shot them both like