Of course, if they were that determined, a lock wouldn’t keep them out for long, but they would have to make some noise breaking in. Then again, the city was full of unlocked houses… maybe the effort alone would persuade them to try something along the next block, something easier.
So once they’d collected the bodies for the pyre, they’d locked the houses up as tight as they could and hid the keys in a place where everyone in the cul-de-sac could find them. Just in case.
Rudy felt the underside of the Sturling’s mailbox and found the square of duct tape hiding the house key. He peeled it free and inserted it into the front door.
The house opened up its jaws, expelling a stale black odor.
“I’ll go through and open the garage,” Rudy volunteered. He looked back at the two men huddled on the step behind him and when neither one spoke up or offered to accompany him, Rudy switched on his flashlight and stepped over the threshold.
The blood splashed over the walls and the carpeting had turned dark and corrupt during the night, though this time he made no attempt to follow it. Instead, he strode purposefully across the living room, cut a corner off the dining room, walked straight through the kitchen and reached for a door that would take him two steps down to the concrete pad of the garage. He did this in a matter of seconds, not wanting to linger in the house on his own, already sensing the memories gathering about him like ghosts, waiting for him to stop and look around. The garage, by contrast, felt cleaner. It smelled not of blood or stale abandonment, but of gasoline, rubber tires and dry grass clippings.
Rudy thought he saw something crouched down behind the tool bench, but when he turned his light toward it, it was only a barbeque, a kettle-shaped carapace standing in the corner on three thin legs.
The motorcycle was just where Shane said it would be: pushed to the back of the garage, dusty and dejected, as if no one bothered to ride it much anymore. A Yamaha 350 with fat, knobby tires.
Naomi’s sporty little Mazda was parked in front of it, but with Keith’s pick-up out in the driveway, Rudy thought they’d be able to shift things around enough to free the bike without moving the car.
He walked to the overhead door and disengaged the lock. The door itself was rigged to an electric opener and required some muscle to lift, but once he got it started, Shane and Larry were on the other side to help.
The first thing he saw when he stepped back into the daylight was the border collie, watching from the shadows across the street.
7
“These are the ones I want you to look for,” Pam said, handing Shane a list with half a dozen drugs spelled out in her careful hand. “The one on the top, the Vancomycin,” she said, pointing, “is the antibiotic I need for your father. It’s intramuscular, so I’m going to need syringes. Pharmacies carry them for diabetics. Bring back the biggest box you can comfortably fit in your backpack.”
“All right,” Shane agreed, frowning at the list, trying to sound out the names in his head.
“The three below it are also antibiotics. The Keflex, Tequin and amoxicillin.” She moved her finger to a second column. “These are painkillers and anesthetics. Morphine, lidocain, novocain. Get everything off the list that you can, but the Vancomycin and morphine are the most important, and the syringes to inject them. If you come back without syringes, the drugs will be of no use to us. Do you understand that?”
Shane nodded. “Yeah, I won’t forget.” He folded the list and put it in his pocket.
She gazed at him for a long moment, until tears began to spill over her lashes.
“Mom,” he said, about to protest, but instead finding himself in a sudden and fierce embrace, as if she didn’t expect to see him again. “I love you,” she told him, looking into his eyes, kissing his face.
“I love you too, Mom.”
“You’re not to take any chances,” she warned, reaching to brush away her tears. “Get in and get out then get yourself back here as quick as you can.”
“I will.”
“I won’t lose the both of you,” she said vehemently, giving him one last kiss before letting go.
8
Shane went inside to say goodbye to his father and the shut-in stench of the bedroom almost knocked him flat. He lit a match and touched it to the candle beside the bed. His father lay shivering, his body sour with perspiration.
Don’t expect to make any sense out of what he says, his mother had warned. He’s not fully conscious. He may not even recognize you.
But Mike had recognized him. Enough to reach out his good hand and tell him he was sorry they were going to miss the ball game. He just didn’t have the strength to get out of bed. Must be some sort of virus going around.
“That’s all right, Dad,” Shane said, thinking that the last baseball game his father had taken him to must have been at least five years ago, when he was eleven or twelve. “You just stay here in bed and let Mom take care of you. I’m going to ride into town with Mr. Hanna and see if I can get you some medicine.”
“You’re a good boy, Shane,” his father grinned, the hollow shadows spreading across his face. “You’ve always been a good boy.” The hand slipped away, back to the sweat-stained sheets, and his eyes closed.
Standing beside the bed, the candle flickering on the nightstand, Shane felt a terrible constriction in his throat as he watched his father struggle within the grip of his delirium. His skin looked flushed, almost burning.
On impulse, Shane reached out and touched his forehead.
Mike Dawley’s eyes flew open and Shane jumped back, startled, his heart hammering, his fingertips felt blistered and numb, as if he’d just plugged into a bad electrical circuit.
His father was staring at him, watching him back away toward the door with an intensity that unnerved him.
Shane remembered the candle and walked back to the nightstand to blow it out.
The last image he had of his father was a grin, and then the room went dark.
He walked slowly to the door, arms out slightly, feeling his way. There came a soft sound behind him: fingernails running down damp sheets.
His father’s soft laughter. “Son?”
Shane hesitated, halfway across the room. “Yeah Dad?”
“My fingers… I can feel them growing back.”
9
Larry kick-started the bike and nodded for Shane to climb on.
With the front end pointed toward Kennedy Street and the engine burning gasoline, the surviving members of Quail Street gathered around the departing pair and wished them luck. Amid the final handshakes and embraces, farewells were exchanged and promises solemnly reaffirmed, yet there was a reluctance to let them go, a sense that the trip was fated to go badly.
Opposed to this was a gathering momentum, as if they could no more remain than hold back the sun, which was already climbing the eastern sky, scorching away the hours until nightfall.
Larry picked up his feet and the bike began to roll.
The wind brushed his face, warmed by the sun.
He glanced over his shoulder at his house, feeling it slip away like a stone off his chest. He had a premonition that he would never set foot in it again.
It was, he decided, not an altogether unpleasant feeling.
10
As Rudy watched them go, he also wondered if he would ever see them again. The odds, he supposed, were about a thousand to one. He looked at Pam Dawley’s face, at the toll the night had taken on it, and wondered if there would be anything left for them to come back to.
Feeling depressed, he turned to shepherd his wife and children back toward the safety of the house, the buzz of the motorcycle distant, already fading into memory.
Perhaps Larry was right, he ruefully reflected. All their plans and efforts…
Perhaps they were nothing but folly.
11
The plan, as it had originally been proposed, was for Shane and Larry to follow a route similar to that Rudy and the others had taken to 7-Eleven, along Kenned
y down to where it met Valley View, then navigating that arterial past the former convenience mart to Long’s drugstore, six blocks further on 4th.
This, however, was debated and discarded as too risky due to the densely populated neighborhoods they would have to pass through along the way, not to mention the large apartment complex directly across from the shopping center itself.
Long’s had always been convenient; it was where most of them had gone to have their prescriptions filled, but now it was likely a deathtrap, if not a burned-out cinder.
Pam had then suggested they take a right instead of a left at Kennedy and go west over the ridge and down the other side, where they could hook up with County Road 27 and then the old highway. The land out that way was mostly ranches and farms, with only a few new housing developments clustered amid the empty pastures.
If they stuck to the outskirts and navigated around the congested streets of the city, there were any number of smaller drugstores they might reach.
Consulting the yellow pages, they found three that might prove relatively easy to access. The first was the Medicine Shoppe in the Summertides shopping center on 27 next to the Summertides golf course. A small pharmacy sandwiched between a hair salon and a pizza parlor; small but specialized, exceedingly well-stocked.
The shopping center itself was small and somewhat isolated. Built in the early 60’s (at the same time as the golf course), it drew its lifeblood from the upscale RV park and condominiums which had sprung up around the fringes of the links. Getting in and out would not be a problem.
The second option was Hoilman’s Drug in the tiny neighboring community of Brace, three or four miles further on. Brace itself was little more than a bump on the old highway; a bump which just so happened to have a drive-in burger stand and a Mom and Pop grocery. The drug store (also a Mom and Pop affair) clung like a concrete parasite to the side of the grocery store; not exactly promising — no one on Quail Street had ever found occasion to step inside — but once again, it was small and easy to approach.
This wasn’t the case for the third option if both Summertides and Brace fell through. If that happened, Larry would have to turn the bike south toward the state highway, which in turn would bring them back toward the city and the Fred Meyer supercenter off Columbia Avenue. Fred Meyer was likely to stock the items they needed, but as large as it was, positioned at the northwest corner of the city, it would naturally attract more people. Worse still, the pharmacy counter lay deep within the store.
Both Larry and Shane agreed that feeling their way about the darkened aisles of a dead and windowless supercenter didn’t hold much appeal. Dead or not, it was apt to be full of surprises, most of them unpleasant.
Nevertheless, it would be a last-ditch effort before turning back to Quail Street or coming up with something on their own. To that effect, Pam reminded them of the clusters of medical buildings further up Columbia. Doctor’s offices and clinics that might be worth considering, to which Rudy shook his head and put forth the opinion it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Larry concluded the discussion, stating simply that he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
12
The first dead man came stumbling at them along Kennedy.
They’d covered less than a quarter mile, seeing nothing more unusual than a Fed-Ex van turned on its side in the grassy ditch. There was a bloody handprint smeared against the bright white panel of the door, a cracked cataract where the windshield had been, but these were in no way conclusive. There was no body so they continued on after a cursory glance, only to encounter a man with a matching Fed-Ex patch on his grass-stained blouse around the next bend. He was peering into a battered mailbox.
Larry slowed the bike to a walk and the man turned, close enough to read the name stitched above his left breast pocket. Leo. Leo had an ugly gash on his forehead and an angry slash down the side of his face. Neither of them looked particularly deep, but there was no mistaking the fever of Wormwood in his eyes.
Shane glanced into the mailbox in passing and saw something that looked dark and sticky. A piece of liver or kidney, his mind whispered; something pulled from a torn abdominal cavity. No telling what Leo was trying to do; mail it, perhaps. It was impossible to say.
Shane felt a strong urge to use his father’s 9mm on the man; snuff him out of existence like a spider poised in the bathroom sink; but the fact was they were likely to come across a great many such victims on the road ahead and their ammunition was extremely limited, so he held on to Larry and let Leo slip away.
It was a decision he’d later come to regret.
13
Half a mile past Hudson Pond, at the crest of the ridge, there was a wide gravel turnabout off the shoulder of the road where drivers could pull off and enjoy a panoramic view of the city. It was a popular place for teenagers to come and park, isolated enough to drink beer and grope one another while the city lights sparkled below.
Larry and Shane found a car parked there as they approached, its front bumper right up to the battered and graffiti-covered guardrail. An old Impala with a torn vinyl roof and a lone silhouette propped up behind the wheel. Larry nosed the Yamaha in well away from it and let the engine sputter to a halt.
The wind rose to fill the silence. A hazy, yellow-colored wind.
Shane eased himself off the back of the bike and Larry swung his leg over, both of them assessing the shape in the Impala before stepping to the guardrail and turning their attention to the city.
“Would you look at that,” Larry whispered, awed by the sight, to which Shane could only shake his head.
The city lay in a wide valley and spread itself out to them like a corpse on an examination table. Whole sections of it were frantically burning, the flames visible to the naked eye even from four or five miles away. Other areas, now stunted and withered, seemed content to smolder, an eerie mist lying over the streets in an unsettling veil. The hand of God descending, only this time it wouldn’t be placated with a splash of lamb’s blood on the door, no more than it would be content with the first-born son. Wormwood, they could see, played no favorites. It simply opened its jaws and devoured everything. No one was safe because no one had built up an immunity to death.
Still, there were large portions of the city that looked untouched by the disease, though this was likely not the case, no more than Quail Street had escaped it. They were simply host to quieter horrors, those content to remain indoors and out of sight. The kind that Larry had left behind in his basement.
All it took was one dead body. A single viable corpse to take root…
And here were the results, spread out before them.
Twenty-four hours and the city was in ruins.
Only God, Larry decided, could work that quickly, and God had turned out to be something of a disappointment; a downright bastard, erasing people and cities like lines from a blackboard. Equations that didn’t balance.
He and Shane gazed at God’s handiwork until they couldn’t take it any longer, until each blink of the eye brought some new atrocity into focus: a church in flames, a shopping center collapsed upon itself, a park or schoolyard strewn with bodies.
And beneath it all, the sound of screams… the steady tat-tat-tat of small arms fire…
Carried up to them on the wings of the wind.
14
The man in the Impala had no face, just a ragged scream blasted into his skull large enough to thread an arm through. A shotgun lay stiffly against the steering wheel, both barrels fired and then fallen into a reverent silence.
Shane wondered if he’d ever get used to such sights, or if they’d cling to him like ghosts, haunting him until he sought the same unbearable release.
There was a note pinned to the man’s chest, folded neatly and addressed: To Whom It May Concern.
Larry knew what it would say the moment he saw it.
Dear Concerned,
I can’t live with myself. I shot my wife and two sons, and even though t
hey had the disease and it was the right thing to do, I can’t get the images out of my head. I see their faces and I hear the sound of the rifle and I know there’s nothing left for me…
He’d written that much himself, scribbled it on the back of a canned food label while a grinning thing watched from its perch in the corner. He’d coughed up those awful, despairing words and then he’d burned them, ashamed, unable to take that final step, to even suggest it on paper.
Yet the idea had never left his mind, and part of him wondered if he’d gone ahead with this trip on the chance he’d never return. The same part of him that still believed that suicide was God’s one unpardonable sin.
He looked at the man in the Impala. At the devastating hole where his face had been.
In the end, what could a simple note say?
That he was in torment, in pain?
They could see that well enough themselves.
Shane reached in and unpinned the sheet from the man’s bloody shirt. As he started to unfold it, Larry snatched it from him, unable to take on the man’s burden. He refolded it and stuffed it into his back pocket, unread.
Shane looked at him, puzzled.
Larry shook his head. “It doesn’t concern us,” he said, turning back to the bike.
15
The north side of the ridge dropped quickly down a canyon and spit them out at a stalled collision. A twisted meeting of pickup, car and trailer which had appeared around a blind corner and sent them skidding toward the ditch.
Shane felt the bike begin to shimmy through a spill of broken glass, the engine protesting as Larry downshifted and they sputtered past the chrome hook of a partially detached bumper, the Yamaha finally arriving at a tentative stop on the graveled shoulder.
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