She pointed at the dull flank of the building. “On the other side, by the deli.”
Larry chewed on his lip, as if reweighing their options. Aside from turning back, they boiled down to smashing the glass or making a run for the other side.
“What do you think?” he asked Shane, exhaling, as if it were a weight too heavy for him to bear.
“We’re already here,” Shane said gloomily. “If they’re in, they’re in. Let’s go ahead and break the glass.” He dropped the hoe with a resigned clatter and picked up his shotgun, swinging the barrel toward the door.
“Don’t,” Larry said, laying a hand on Shane’s shoulder. “Save your shells. Let Wifey here do it with her pot.”
“My name is Rachel,” the woman asserted, fixing Larry with a look that implied she could think of another use for the pot. “Rachel Walker.”
A hiccough of laughter bubbled out of Larry. “Pleased to meet you, Rachel. I’m Larry and this is Shane. Now, if the introductions are all settled to your satisfaction, will you please break the damn window? We’ve had a bit of a day.”
Rachel shook her head in dismissal and clipped past Larry, the pot swinging at the end of her arm like a bowling ball. With a warning to Shane to move back, she took aim at one of the lower panels: one they’d have to get down and crawl through. This, she reasoned, might discourage followers; most of the dead ones she’d observed weren’t smart enough to duck through a hole in a glass door. Some were, but by no means a majority.
Larry watched her wind up. He thought of cautioning her that the glass was stronger than it looked, then thought better of it, recalling the broken pots lying behind him.
She pitched the hardened clay and it impacted with a brittle explosion, a mutual annihilation, with both the pot and the panel lying in broken shards across the threshold.
Rachel dusted her palms on her shorts, glanced at Larry, then ducked inside the foyer without another word.
With a conceding grunt, Larry waved Shane inside, the lengthening shadows of the dead edging over the sidewalk now, moving slowly up the wall. Larry turned his revolver on the closest one — a woman whose pendulous breasts were hanging out of her blouse like two raw cuts of meat — and fired, laughing softly to himself as a piece of her skull skipped angrily across the parking lot.
Retreating, he pushed over the gardening displays that had been left outside, creating a weak barricade to cover his back as he turned and ducked inside the store.
Part Seven:
Destination
1
As soon as Larry was inside, Shane pushed a row of shopping carts over the broken panel; then, with Larry’s help, they blocked it in place with 50-pound bags of playground sand, which was stacked conveniently in the foyer. As they completed this, the overturned jumble of displays outside the doors parted with an iron shudder and a fleshy, insistent sort of pounding and exploration began against the glass. Smeary fingers touched and withdrew as dead eyes looked in at them longingly, as if they needed to walk and browse amongst the familiar aisles as much as they needed to pass on their disease.
Shane and Larry gazed back at them, taking in their slack (though not expressionless) faces. It was a brief opportunity to observe the enemy close up, in relative safety, without the notched sight of a gun barrel wavering in-between. What they found, however, was not enlightenment, but a grim sense of destiny, as if the one thing that separated them from the contagion outside was not a thin sheet of glass, but something much more tentative. A capricious whim of Fate.
Decaying hands and faces slid stubbornly against the glass, distorting their appearance even further.
One day, those faces insisted, your luck will fail.
Tomorrow, a week… or perhaps only a few moments from now.
You will fall, they whispered, and this will be the result.
A voice called out behind them. “Richard?”
Rachel was poised beside the checkout counter, on tiptoes staring into the vast and darkened cavern of the store, gazing into its depths as if it were a subterranean lake, filled with strange creatures that might be staring back at her.
She raised her voice. “Richard? Are you there?”
Beneath the beating of their own hearts, Shane and Larry could hear things moving about, lost within the sightless maze of aisles. Not a multitude, but enough that they could expect to meet a few unfriendly faces. The sound of Rachel’s voice seemed to stir them, to draw them from their quiet reveries.
Alarmed at the sight of a gaunt, acne-scarred face materializing out of the gloom, legs beneath it slowly shuffling, Larry unholstered his gun and asked her what she thought she was doing.
“My husband’s in here!” she hissed, wearing a pinched expression, as if she’d begun to resent him as much as he resented her.
“If he’s here, we’ll find him,” Larry assured her, then added (quite unnecessarily), “or he’ll find us.”
Shane, ignoring the both of them, set his shotgun on the checkout conveyor and faded toward an aisle filled with twilight and long wooden handles. He paused a moment, considering the inventory, then took down an axe — a sharp, grim-looking specimen that made Rachel’s mouth gape in disbelief.
“What are you doing with that? You’ve got guns, don’t you?”
Shane shook his head. “I’ll use the guns on my way back home; I’ll need the bullets then.” He hefted the axe. “In here, I’ll use this.”
“Oh my God!” she cried, her face blanching. “I can’t watch you chop up those… those things with that!”
“Do whatever you like,” Shane invited, quietly dismissing her. He turned to Larry. “How do I get to the pharmacy?”
“Now just a minute,” Larry protested, his face red, exasperated. He glanced at the dead man — within fifty feet of them now — uncertain whether or not to waste a bullet. “I’ll tell you where it is, but it’s stupid to split up now! We ought to stick together, that way we can watch each other’s back.”
“All right,” Shane nodded, conceding the point. “Let’s go then.”
“What about me?” Rachel objected, standing empty-handed by the cash register.
“Find something to protect yourself,” Larry advised, holstering his revolver and drifting toward a shelf stacked with steel fence posts, the sort generally used to string barbed-wire.
Glancing around the checkout counter, Rachel saw nothing but outdated magazines and minty packets of gum.
“Like what?” she wondered.
“Whatever you can handle,” Larry replied, sliding out one of the posts. It had a point like an oversized arrowhead: dull, flat and green, ready-made to drive into the ground. “Look over by Shane for a pry-bar or a good, solid hammer.”
Rachel shuddered. “I don’t think I can do that.”
“Why not? You didn’t have a problem with those clay pots.”
“That was different,” she said sullenly. “Those were blunt.”
“So’s a hammer.”
“Not blunt enough,” she said, shaking her head.
Larry shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He tested the weight of the post, hefting it in the palm of his hand, balancing it like a javelin. “Maybe you can find yourself a cast-iron frying pan in Housewares, or a marble rolling pin.”
The dead man was closing, tottering around a pyramidal paint display to within 10 or 12 yards of the registers. He began to moan eagerly, his arms outstretched, climbing through the stale air.
The steel post poised at his shoulder, Larry took a few running steps and hurled it through the man’s skull with a savage grunt. The sound it made as it passed through his eye socket and into the fevered meat of his brain was crisp, like an apple bite. A faint spray of blood fanned across the aisle and the paint display swallowed him whole, the fence post jutting out of the fallen mound like a victory spike or a flagpole. A miniature Iwo Jima.
“Can we go now?” Shane asked, his tone impatient and unimpressed.
2
The pharmacy counte
r was near the back of the store, sandwiched between Housewares and the magazine display. From where they stood (on the fringes of Lawn and Garden) they would have to travel through the forgotten lands of Hardware, Home Improvement, Sporting Goods, and finally Housewares before reaching the pharmacy.
“We can go about this a couple different ways, Larry said, extending a pointing finger toward the back of the store, toward a darkness that was more complete than in any other direction. “Straight back that way and along the back wall, or…” — he gestured to a wide aisle that traversed the entire width of the store like a wax-buffed interstate — “down that way, and then back.”
“What does it matter?” Rachel asked, a malletlike hammer in her hands, the head smothered nervously in her palm. “Just pick a direction and go.”
Larry looked at her, a fresh fence post propped against his shoulder. “Standing here, it doesn’t make a bit of difference,” he said, annoyed at being challenged by her at every step, “but if we get into trouble, it might be nice to have something useful near at hand. Something sharp or heavy.” He tipped his head toward the dark quarter. “If we go that way, we’re more likely to find items of that nature. If we go the other…” he shrugged. “Who knows? We may find nothing on the shelves but greeting cards and tampons.”
Rachel smiled sardonically and shook her head. “Greeting cards, yes, but I guarantee you’re not going to find any tampons in this store. Not this one or any other.”
Larry opened his mouth to say something, then promptly shut it, flustered and embarrassed, waving the point aside as inconsequential. “It doesn’t matter. If we go down the center aisle we’re more open to ambush; if we go across the back, we’ve at least got the wall to one side.” He hesitated. “Plus, I’m not exactly certain where to cut back to get to the pharmacy.”
Rachel sighed. “Well why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”
3
The small penlights they’d brought were not up to the task of illuminating the aisles, at least not in a manner with which they felt comfortable. The beams were weak and yellowy, dissolving into the general gloom and imparting a grainy, suffocating quality, like being trapped under an old woolen blanket. Dark shapes forever fluttered on the threshold of vision; inconstant ghosts that shied away with every step.
At the same time, the flares that Shane had picked up along the roadside weren’t ideal either. At the drop of the first one, it became obvious that they would be of limited use. On the move, the influence of their light was short-lived, and in the end they acted more like beacons than anything else. Better — Larry decided, once this became apparent — to use them as distractions, things for the dead to fight over amongst themselves.
So they used the penlights to make their way to the pharmacy, tripping over the occasional item that had been left in the aisles: cans of spray paint and WD-40, golf balls and wooden dowels; an avalanche of galvanized nails; items that had been picked up and discarded or simply knocked off the shelves by clumsy browsers. The nails had a knack of hiding from their flashlights then rolling silently underfoot, bringing short, sharp screams out of Rachel and dark expletives from Shane and Larry. Slow, dragging footsteps shadowed them, accompanied by despairing moans that seemed born out of the air itself, without source or direction.
They crept past an aisle stocked with plumbing and electrical supplies, then made a 90-degree turn around a customer service kiosk mounted with paint shakers, silent and useless in this dead, black corner.
A slack arm reached out of a gap in the back of the kiosk, its pale form uncovered suddenly by Shane’s penlight: bare to the elbow and flecked with spatters of paint or dried blood. It lay along the floor like a dead snake, the fingers splayed and partially eaten, nibbled slightly about the nails then left to rot.
They made a wide pass around it, as if suspecting it might not be completely dead. Shane shone his light into the gap and a wave of nausea rolled out like a black tongue, pebbled and swollen and as dry as a reptile. Two eyes gazed up from the pale edge of the beam: shriveled, sunken into screaming hollows, yet watchful all the same.
They left it to the darkness, to the blooming stench of its own decay.
Home Improvement gradually changed to Home Décor. Tables and chairs, lamps and throw pillows, photograph frames and silent clocks.
Shane swept his flashlight in a low arc and Rachel gasped, freezing in step behind him. Just before Larry bumped into her, he had an impression of Death staring back at him: a white face floating in the aisles. He focused his light on it and Rachel screamed against the knuckles of her free hand.
“Richard, oh my God!” she cried and the mallet dropped to the floor like a silly and useless toy. “Richard!”
She ran to her husband, clipping a straight-backed chair with her hip and knocking it over.
“No, don’t!” Larry shouted, his voice swallowed by the vast acreage of the store. “Rachel!”
Shane made a grab for her as she darted past, lost his grip on the penlight, and a black and gloomy curtain dropped suddenly in front of him. The light tumbled down his pantleg and he inadvertently kicked it down the aisle. It spun past Rachel and her husband and came to rest illuminating a damaged group of figures shuffling slowly up the aisle.
“We’ve got problems!” Shane shouted, taking the axe in both hands. He brushed past Rachel after the fallen flashlight, more afraid of being left in the dark at that moment than anything else. Despite everything he’d been through, the dead shapes seemed somehow unreal within the confines of the store; they seemed more like disgruntled mannequins than any serious threat.
Larry, however, knew better, and his voice as he shouted after Shane was red with alarm. The fence post he’d brought along was poised above his shoulder, but there was no clear target; nothing he could do but shout.
He took a tentative step toward Rachel as she pushed away from her husband’s embrace, a shrill scream spreading out of her like a shock wave, knocking everything back a beat. In the cone of Larry’s penlight, Richard Walker’s mouth had become crimson, almost clownlike. Then the red from his lips ran down his chin and the deadness in his eyes rolled over. It changed into the unmistakable face of Wormwood.
Rachel screamed and pressed her hand to her shoulder, trying to stop the blood even as it pulsed through the cracks between her fingers. She broke free of her husband’s grasp and took a blind step back, tripping over the chair she’d upended in her unthinking rush to meet him. The spot of Larry’s flashlight followed her down, shocked at the amount of blood already pouring down the front of her blouse; at the terrible wound gaping at the base of her neck; a raw, red mouth that screamed in blood instead of sound.
Richard Walker looked through the light at Larry, then down at his wife, ribbons of frank red blood slipping out of his mouth and pattering against the tops of his shoes.
Further down the aisle, around the glow of the fallen penlight, shadows began to merge and flicker. He heard Shane grunt; saw the swing of the axe, and something fell to the floor like a sodden dishrag. A man with a bald and gleaming head fell to his knees, his guts rolling out of him in silver coils. Shane swung the axe again and his bald head disappeared, swallowed by the darkness crouched further down the aisle.
Rachel struggled to sit up, to untangle her legs from the chair as her husband bent over her with all the grace of a man struck with a debilitating arthritis. She screamed, her voice bubbling, and Larry planted his post in the top of Walker’s head.
The dead man reeled back, looking absurdly like a human lightning rod. His feet shuffled a few last steps then the bright green post swept one of the shelves as he fell, taking down a collection of picture frames. Oak and metal and glass clacked over like dominos, burying him beneath a spill of airbrushed faces. Models so pleasing and pure they almost made you sad to replace them with your own imperfect snapshots and relations.
Larry heard Shane swear as something heavy fell and smashed to pieces, but for the moment his eyes were
on Rachel, who was swimming in a puddle of her own blood, trying desperately to stay afloat. He knelt down as she opened her mouth and tried to speak. What came out of her lips was little more than a whisper, a dark understanding of the way things were.
She saw herself caught in the sympathetic reflection of his eyes. Pinned and dying there.
“Don’t…” she struggled, painting an angel’s wing on the polished tiles. “Don’t let it happen to me. I don’t,” — she coughed and Larry flinched, his face speckled with dots he quickly wiped away — “I don’t want to turn into one of those.” Her eyes seemed to strain toward her husband, toward the shapes falling in the center of the aisle. Her hand moved, grasping Larry’s forearm. “Promise me,” she implored, then her breath touched his cheek and she died before he could answer, her grip on him slowly relaxing.
Larry took his arm back and got to his feet, afraid her eyes would snap suddenly back open. He stepped over her with a hand on his revolver, ready to pull it from its holster at the slightest hint of movement. It had taken a minute or two for his own wife to cross over, down in the grim light of the bomb shelter, but he wasn’t certain that that held true for everyone. Some might take longer and some might take less, and at the moment he wasn’t in a mood for gambling. There were worse places to die than the Home Décor section of Fred Meyer, but there were surely better places as well.
Slipping on the fallen frames, the glass panes cracking beneath his weight, Larry grasped the post he’d left with Rachel’s husband and, bracing a foot against his skull, pulled it free with a sickened grunt. In the back of his mind, he recalled those British vampire pictures he and his older brother used to watch as kids: the ones that always started with some fool pulling a wooden stake out of a decrepit old coffin.
Walker, however, seemed content to stay where he was. There was no unearthly luminescence within the wound, no swirl of ashes eager to paste him back together, so Larry let him be and carried the post back over to Rachel.
Wormwood Page 20