“What about Autumn Creek Road?” Shane suggested, the two of them debating their options. “If we can make it across the river, it’ll take us right to Fred Meyer’s back parking lot.”
Larry considered it. Autumn Creek Road was a narrow, two-lane passage sandwiched between the river and a high, muscular ridge, the steep uniformity of the later broken by twisted gullies and rocky canyons as it rose westward from the city. There was a green belt of land running along the eroded base of the ridge, containing a few orchards and private homes, but because it was prone to flooding, it had remained sparsely populated.
“We’ll still have to take the highway for two or three miles,” Larry said, “and hope at least one of the bridges is passable… but I think it’s worth a try, depending on what we find along Highway 12.”
Shane nodded. “Let’s do it then.”
Larry smiled and kick-started the bike. “Aye-aye, Captain.”
They puttered past the ghostly ruins of the drive-in, searching for the road out of Brace. They passed it once then found it circling back, searching the area where Larry last remembered it. It appeared as a warped slab threading its way through a singed copse of cottonwoods.
A dead skunk lay just beyond the first bend, flattened down to a sunbeaten smell hovering over a flyblown matting in the pavement. As they passed it, Larry said something he didn’t quite catch; though Shane understood his pointing finger well enough.
The shapes of several cars and trucks loomed ahead, backed up along the east and westbound entry lanes and on both shoulders as well, as if patiently waiting for a ferry.
There were slow silhouettes moving amongst the gridlock, owners reluctant to abandon their blocked vehicles, even after death. Not many, but a few.
“Better get those guns ready,” Larry advised.
23
The man with the potbelly and the “Live Free or Die!” t-shirt was the first to take notice of their approach. He had wedged himself into an angled space between a pickup and a camper, but when he broke free he came at them at a run. This was nothing like the infirm and elderly shuffle they had encountered at Summertides, but something which — if he struck them — might well knock them off the motorcycle like a rhino charging a Jeep.
He didn’t look particularly damaged either, Shane noticed; more like he’d died of exposure or boredom inside his car rather than falling prey to the ravages of the masses. There was a dark smudge of dried blood or oil at the corner of his mouth, as if he’d been eating something raw or combustible, but that was all.
Swinging the shotgun around, Shane leveled it at the stretched eagle on the man’s t-shirt, waiting until he was within fifteen yards of them before thundering off his first shot. It struck the man across the chest in a bloodied pattern that clipped the tail feathers and the “Live Free” portion of his shirt, but as a deterrent, it was about as effective as a handful of gravel flung at a 16 pound bowling ball.
Shane raised the barrel slightly and fired again, this time from less than ten feet away.
This had the desired effect of getting the man’s head rolling in the opposite direction, but the legs and overstuffed t-shirt were still coming at them, packed with enough deadweight and momentum to hit their right flank dead on.
Larry goosed the throttle and the bike hopped neatly forward, almost tumbling Shane off the back. The corpse sailed past them, crashing with grim finality in the dry and thorny weeds beyond the shoulder of the road.
By the time Shane regained his balance, two more of the atrocities had appeared. Where they’d come from he hadn’t a clue, but they were badly burned, so blistered and charred that they looked more like worms than human beings. Bald mutations crawled out of a radioactive desert; naked yet sexless.
He supposed they must have come from Brace.
Larry was able to maneuver around them, leaving the crowded asphalt and angling down the soft slope of the shoulder. Once there, and through a shallow screen of trees, they found themselves faced with a seamless wall of traffic, a westward exodus of empty cars which had been hopelessly stalled by something beyond their sight and comprehension.
Larry faltered, uncertain which direction to take to get around them. The line seemed to stretch, solid and unbroken, for hundreds of yards in either direction. The sputtering sound of the idling engine, now out in the open, began drawing unwanted attention.
“Which way?” he shouted to Shane, hoping the kid had a better vantage than he did, though this seemed unlikely: both of them occupying a single seat on the same motorcycle.
“Left!” Shane shouted back, firing his father’s 9mm at a woman in shorts and a summer blouse approaching from that same direction.
The bullet knocked her down and Larry drove over her neck, feeling her hands flutter at his ankles even as the weight of the bike passed over her.
A boy with curly blonde hair, his iPod headphones still clipped to his ears, came bounding out of the line of cars like a wolf cub, his mouth an infected sore that had ruptured and turned black in the sunlight. Shane saw that the boy was going to catch them; that, in all likelihood, a single bite from his swollen mouth would be enough to infect an entire city.
He tried to bring him down with the shotgun but found he couldn’t turn far enough on the seat to get him in his sights; not even with the handgun. Faced with this dilemma — of feeling diseased fingernails drag him off the back of the motorcycle or jumping off himself — Shane shouted for Larry to keep going and took his chances on the later.
The Yamaha wasn’t moving fast, certainly no better than 7 or 8 miles per hour across the uneven terrain, but Shane knew he was heading for a crash as soon as he and the bike parted company. The knobby rear tire, stripped of its fender, caught the inside of his thigh with an excruciating burn and from there it was just a matter of controlling his fall as best he could. There were two or three impossible strides, then his ankle turned on a loose rock and the next thing he knew he was choking on dust, all the breath knocked out of him. Curled up in a defensive ball, the shotgun and pistol flown from his grasp, Shane felt the blonde boy stumble over him and go sprawling just as gracelessly, throwing up another cloud of dust.
Shane realized that he probably had bare seconds left to live and the thought jolted him to his feet, unaware of the burn in his thigh, the swell of his ankle and the myriad scrapes and contusions all over his body.
He was aware that the blonde boy was getting rapidly to his feet.
And that he no longer had a gun to defend himself.
Forty feet away, Larry had brought the motorcycle to an awkward halt, he had unholstered one of his own guns and was busy firing it into the empty dust and sky, but to Shane these things seemed distant and unimportant, incapable of touching him.
The world around Shane seemed to shrink down to a scuffled patch of dry weeds, and in a panic, he searched amongst them for his guns, knowing they had to be somewhere near.
The blonde boy broke into a predatory lope, coming at him with his mouth open and his arms outstretched.
Larry was firing his gun. Shane felt one of the bullets whiz past his face like an angry hornet. Something fell heavily to the ground behind him and he stumbled over it; he went down into the embrace of its soft putrescence.
Then the blonde boy was on top of him, the two of them grappling.
Shane managed to get a knee up between them as he caught hold of the boys flailing arms, screaming out loud with the terror and effort it took to keep the snarling face at bay. Ironically, with his leg folded against his chest and the weight of the boy pressing down on him, Shane glimpsed the polished steel of the hunting knife strapped just below his knee. Its rounded butt close enough to see his distorted reflection in, though it might have been on a mountaintop in Tibet for all the good it would do him now; he couldn’t relinquish his hold on his opponent long enough to grasp it.
His opponent…
This boy, surely no older than 12 or 13… the awful black cavity of his mouth snapping over h
im like the beak of a squid or an octopus, leaning closer until Shane feared the infection would drool down onto his face. The boy seemed to have no saliva though, just a dry and feverish rot that made Shane gag when he could no longer escape it.
A shadow flickered by, followed by a succession of gunshots that sounded like God Himself was standing over him, harvesting His bounty with a Smith & Wesson instead of a scythe. The blonde boy was dealt an unseen blow from above and his mouth seemed to exhale from the force of it. His face froze, slackened, then all the tension went out of him like a raft quickly deflating.
A thin strand of something that might have been blood began to descend from his mouth and Shane pitched the corpse aside. It rolled over into the dust with the grip of Larry’s own knife protruding from the back of its skull.
Shane was on his feet again in an instant, wiping frantically at his face for fear that some of the boy’s fluids might have splattered on him. There was a dead woman in his shadow, face-down in the dirt with a pair of stained bicycle shorts stretched over the ponderous width of her thighs.
“Are you all right?” Larry asked, sparing Shane the briefest of glances before taking a shot at an approaching state trooper: a man so badly mutilated that, aside from knocking him down, there was no way of telling where the bullet impacted.
“I think so,” Shane replied, then a bright note of panic asserted itself. “I don’t know!” He looked at his hands and saw a faint smear of something that might have issued from the boy, though he himself was oozing blood from several places: shallow cuts and abrasions sustained during his abrupt dismount and fall. He had no concussion or broken bones, he could walk or run if he had to… but was he all right? Had something irreversible been passed to him from the boy? It was a chilling thought, and his first impulse was to run straight to the river — winding its usual course, 50 or 60 yards away, completely unaffected by recent events — and scrub himself clean with both hands. At the same time, however, he knew such measures were useless. If the disease was in him, then it was in him, and all the water in the world wasn’t going to help. The antibiotics they were after might (he had to believe so for his father’s sake), but the truth was no one knew how Wormwood traveled or what affect it had upon the living. He would either get sick and die or go on living. It was an uncertainty he was going to have to get used to.
Meanwhile, the state trooper was slowly getting up again.
“Find your guns,” Larry advised and stepped forward to put his last chamber into the man’s forehead.
Shane looked up from his hands. More shapes were lurching eagerly down the embankment: slowly or not so slowly, depending on their condition.
“Make it quick!” Larry snapped, reloading his gun. “I’ll get the bike started.”
Shane started pacing the area, finding the shotgun almost immediately, but having more difficulty with his dad’s 9mm. When one of the gruesome shapes got too close he took a step back and shot it in the head, by luck finding his lost pistol underfoot, hiding in a patch of goldenrod.
He snatched it up and ran toward Larry.
24
So in fits and stops, in gunfire and frustration, they searched for a gap wide enough to maneuver the bike across the westbound lanes, finding one at last half a mile from where they’d come out of Brace.
For the most part the cars they’d passed had been abandoned, discarded when they’d become mired in the gridlock, but there were still nightmares to be found, enough to spawn a dark city of dreams.
Some were bloody, torn to pieces and buzzing with flies. Unrecognizable.
Others were trapped in a kind of limbo or purgatory inside their cars, blocked by the proximity of neighboring vehicles or because they were too young to have ever worked a lock or a door handle. Infants and toddlers still buckled into their boosters and car seats, their plump hands slapping angrily at the glass, smearing it, wanting to be let out. Their heads loomed, swollen and bruised looking, like overripe fruit.
The rest wandered amongst the fields and along the highway — amnesiatic travelers who no longer remembered where they were going or where they’d come from — excited by the bright movement of the motorcycle, but unable to cross or negotiate the solid maze of stalled vehicles.
At one point, not long before they found the gap, Larry braked abruptly beside the flank of a smashed blue Corolla, no different in Shane’s eyes than any of the other vehicles they’d passed. Two adult figures, bloody and broken, lay slumped in the front seat while two teenaged girls scratched and clawed in the back, agitated by bike’s proximity. Larry pulled his revolver from its holster and emptied it into the interior.
When the gun stopped firing, the girls lay in silent tangles.
“What did you do that for?” Shane asked, aghast at the senseless waste of ammunition.
Larry reloaded the gun. “I knew them,” he said, his voice haunted and hollow, his fingers trembling as he fit fresh bullets, one by one, into the warm cylinder. “Dick and Shauna Masterson… their daughters Tammy and Tina.” He closed the revolver and put it back in its holster. “They belonged to our church. I’ve known them since the girls were in kindergarten.”
Shane nodded, not sure what to say.
Larry shook his head as if trying to clear it of a lingering fog, an unsettling dream in which he’d gunned down two young girls for reasons he could no longer recall. “This is not at all what I had in mind,” he said aloud, cryptically, and with a measure of doubt. The same Larry that Shane had seen walk distractedly out of his house that morning.
Shane was about to ask him what he meant, but before he could Larry’s hands settled on the grips and they were off again.
25
They crossed the highway in front of a Greyhound bus that had turned on its side and slid across both westbound lanes. There was evidence of collision, a mass of scorched metal joined to its undercarriage, but the bus had held its ground, quietly burning then guttering where it lay. It offered them a gap of 3 or 4 feet where traffic had streamed around it then tried to get back on the roadway, some having more luck at this than others.
Larry and Shane paused to look inside the Greyhound’s shattered front window, though what they saw huddled in the back was unclear. It moved, however. To Shane it looked like a giant spider, its many arms and legs poised and trembling, ready to strike if they wandered too near. To Larry, it was simply a bloody and writhing mass, as if all the passengers had been ground into hamburger and were slowly reassembling themselves into a form that might one day hope to crawl.
The smell, charred and oily, yet at the same time redolent of a backyard barbeque, reminded them how long it had been since they’d last eaten. This was an uneasy thought and they hurried past as if it had been whispered with a sly grin from one of the shattered windows.
26
The eastbound lanes, by contrast, were relatively clear and allowed them to make quick progress to the Autumn Creek exit, traveling at times up to 35 mph and speeding past most of the situations they’d had to use a gun for beyond the opposite lanes.
The short spur spanning the swollen river and linking Highway 12 with Autumn Creek Road was even better, and once they crossed the river they were able to take something of a breather, breaking food out of the improvised saddlebags of their backpacks and filling their pockets from the dwindling supply of ammunition. They found, with dismay, that of the 100 or so rounds they’d left with, over half were already gone, and there was still the return trip to consider.
“Maybe Fred Meyer carries ammunition with its sporting goods,” Shane said, his voice cautiously optimistic. “Places like that, they usually sell it out of a locked display case.”
Larry smiled wanly. “Maybe we’ll find a sales clerk to unlock it for us.”
Shane shrugged and looked downriver, at a tangle of driftwood piled up on the rocky shallows of the north bank. He noticed, with discomfort, a pale clutch of human limbs there as well. Bodies blanched and undressed by the strong currents. Another
floated past under the concrete span of the bridge, turning and struggling in the water like a spider being washed down the sinkhole.
“I would imagine,” Larry continued, his voice softening as he watched the man float away, “that ammunition and alcohol were two of the first things to disappear from a place like Fred Meyer. Still…” he offered Shane a more hopeful smile, “that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about the beer I’ll have once we get there; and how’s this for pathetic: it’s even a cold one.” He bit off a hunk of beef jerky, chewing thoughtfully. “Right about now, it’s the only thing I’ve got to look forward to.”
“There’s always home,” Shane suggested, the words out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying.
The last vestiges of Larry’s smile faded. He studied Shane before turning back to the river.
“I’m sorry,” Shane said in a fragile whisper, his eyes gazing down at his hands, which seemed restless, agitated.
Larry nodded. “Believe it or not,” he confessed, “there have been times today when I’ve forgotten about them myself.”
Shane looked at Larry, at the bodies in the river, then back to his hands again, comfortable with their silent neutrality. “Me too,” he admitted, frowning. “Sometimes I forget about Mom and Dad.”
Larry sighed. “Selfish of us, isn’t it? But I suppose that’s what makes us human.”
Shane said nothing, his hands pecking at some long grass between his shoes.
“It’s been an interesting day,” Larry remarked, looking at the sky and the position of the sun above the bluff behind them. Already the afternoon was lengthening, pulling shadows toward the east. “Offhand, I’d say we’re not going to make it home before it’s over, and I don’t care much for the prospect of traveling at night.” He glanced at Shane. “Got any ideas where we might hole up until morning?”
Wormwood Page 18