“Just hold on to them,” Shane answered, leaving him to wonder.
14
There was a woman’s silhouette propped up behind the checkout register near Aisle 7, one that neither Shane nor Larry noticed until they were almost within arm’s reach of her.
“Jesus!” Shane swore, dropping Larry’s legs with heart-thumping haste and fumbling for his gun. Amid the screams and curses, he pointed the muzzle breathlessly at her head and lifted his penlight. The silhouette turned into a plump redhead by the name of “Dawna”; one who, by reason of her brown apron and nametag, had once worked as a checker for the Fred Meyer Corporation.
Her short, matronly body seemed to be swaying ever-so-slightly, as if she had been waiting there at her post for days. She seemed not to notice Shane or the gun or even the spot of light on her face.
“What’s going on?” Larry demanded, invisible now on the floor.
“There’s a woman standing here,” Shane answered, though in a whisper, as if he was afraid he’d wake her.
“Shoot her!” Larry hissed. He had his gun out now, though the bulk of the check-out counter prevented him from getting a clear shot at her.
“I’m not sure if she’s dead!” Shane objected, the beam from his penlight playing over her. The counter itself blocked her from the waist down, but from what Shane could see she looked whole and undamaged. There was a line of dried blood running from the shadow of her ear to her collar, but it hardly looked fatal. And there was no point in wasting a bullet if he didn’t have to.
Cautiously, he tucked the light under his arm and reached for a magazine. Rolling it against his side, he used the end of it to prod the freckled flesh of her left arm.
Quick as a rattlesnake, she snatched it out of his hand, skimmed it over the dead iris of her scanner and let it fly over the end of the counter, its pages fluttering like the wings of an indignant bird. This completed (as if she’d been told by God to wait for them), Dawna toppled over into the darkness beneath her register.
Unnerved and surprised, Shane uttered a short, uncertain laugh, his heartbeat a dull thunder between his ears. He leaned over the counter on tiptoe and looked down at her, the penlight trembling.
Her eyes were wide, unblinking, gazing past him toward Heaven; her head strangely foreshortened, as if a yarmulke-sized divot had been taken out of the back. As he noticed this, a dark stain began to spread around her like a halo, dampening her hair and lapping at the pale stalk of her neck.
This was confirmation enough for Shane. He put down his heels and reholstered his gun.
“Must have been a reflex,” he murmured, dismissing her and shining his light at the inky gloom beyond the ATM and the lottery ticket dispenser, trying to plot out his next 30 or 40 steps. There was a faint, squarish suggestion of an opening, possibly a corridor leading back to the manager’s office or possibly his imagination drawing shapes against a smooth blank wall.
Whichever, nothing better suggested itself.
He clipped the penlight back to his collar and squatted beside Larry. His neighbor seemed to be drifting again, his gun resting on his chest, his face a pale mask left lying on the floor.
“Whassut,” he said thickly as Shane took the gun out of his hand and snugged it back in his holster.
“Almost there,” Shane assured him, quickly gathering up the things Larry had dropped and depositing them in a plastic grocery bag. He tied the bag to one of his belt loops and, as Larry’s eyes sank back toward unconsciousness, rearranged his neighbor’s arms to better negotiate the narrow checkout aisle.
Satisfied, he got to his feet and looked around. Through the high windows, the twilight had faded and true night was gazing in at them. To the right, past the last registers and the latté stand, things were bumping against the locked doors. Gray smudges pawing softly against the glass.
Shane turned away, hoping their numbers didn’t multiply during the night, and pointed his light at the dim wall beyond the ATM. Real or imaginary, the shape was still there, waiting for them.
He picked up Larry’s legs and began to drag him toward it.
15
A sign materialized.
RESTROOMS, it pointed, and Shane uttered a long sigh. He looked down the corridor and the polished steel of a drinking fountain winked back, as if pleased to see him. A second sign — smaller and more discouraging — indicated that the manager’s office was near.
Shane grinned. “Found it!” he whispered and Larry stirred slightly against the tiles, just enough to assure them both he wasn’t dead.
Shane pulled him past the drinking fountain and a wide gap appeared directly opposite, reserved for EMPLOYEES ONLY. Curious, Shane stopped long enough to look inside.
It had once been a break room or employee lounge, furnished with tables and darkened vending machines, now utterly silent. A man sat at one of the far tables, his head cradled in his arms, a large amount of congealed blood pooled on the floor around him, as if he had slit his wrists and then curled up to sleep. There were shotgun holes blasted in the walls and through one of the vending machines. Nearer to the door, a pair of legs and a slack white arm protruded from an overturned trash barrel.
Nothing much of interest, though the concentration of smells — the blood, the bodies, the food in the dispensers gone bad — was much worse than the rest of the store.
Shane let the light swing from his shirt and trudged onward, pulling Larry toward a T-shaped junction. A door marked MEN stood soberly against the painted plaster, its blonde wood dully gleaming; another chamber of horrors to be opened and stared down, though not just yet.
Shane halted at the junction and probed his options with the penlight. To the left he found the ladies room; to the right a set of double-doors also marked EMPLOYEES ONLY; and further on, like a mirage shimmering at the edge of a dream, one marked MANAGER.
16
It was locked, of course; the location of the key anyone’s guess.
Shane thought of the man in the break room and wondered if he might have them, the ring tangled in the sodden folds of his pocket. Briefly, he considered walking back and fishing for them, then a dark shudder passed through him. If that were the case, Shane thought, he could keep them; better to simply use the axe. True, it would ruin the lock, but there were likely heavy things within the office that could be persuaded to stand guard over them while they slept: a good-sized desk or a loaded set of file cabinets pushed up against the door as a barricade.
He looked at Larry and picked up the axe, holding it loosely, near the head.
Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.
Jack Nicholson’s voice, grinning beside him in the dark.
Shane took a step back, gripping the axe with both hands, though choking up on it, wanting only to knock off the steel doorknob, not destroy the integrity of the door itself. The knob floated just outside the cone of his light, like a planet: a silvery crescent drifting along the cusp of twilight. Shane positioned the butt-end of the blade a foot or two over it, dropping it down sharply when he felt confident of his mark. It glanced away, leaving a bright nick in the polished steel and a numb tingle in his bones.
He tried again, harder this time, and a scream sounded behind the door, startling him. Larry flinched in the darkness behind him, coming back to life with a jerk.
“Where are we?” he gasped, his face slick with perspiration, his eyes two feverish moons.
“Outside the manager’s office,” Shane answered. “The door’s locked and there’s someone inside.”
“Who?” Larry whispered, suddenly terrified of what they might let out.
“I don’t know, but it sounds like a woman; she’s still alive,” Shane added.
Larry seemed to breathe a little easier. “Be careful,” he hissed, his good hand reaching blindly for his gun.
Shane nodded and raised a hand, rapping his knuckles lightly on the door.
“Hello?”
There was no answer, but Shane thought he heard moveme
nt. A thin scrape in the dark.
He knocked again, more insistently this time.
“Hello?” he called, not wanting to shout but needing to convey their urgency. “Open the door, please. I’ve got an injured man out here.” He paused a heartbeat or two to listen. “We don’t mean you any harm.”
Good, he thought, shaking his head stupidly. Famous last words. We come in peace.
He knocked again, this time with the head of the axe. “Please,” he emphasized. “I’ve got an axe and I’ve got a gun. I can knock it down if I have to, but that won’t do either of us any good.”
Silence, unbroken by even a scrape this time.
Shane sighed and readjusted his grip on the axe. As he raised it to take another chop at the doorknob, a voice issued through the wood, little more than a faint whisper to his ear.
“What do you want?” it asked; tentative and frightened. A woman’s voice. “You’ve got the whole store. Just take what you want and leave.”
Shane glanced at Larry, lying quietly on the floor behind him, his head raised, listening. “We can’t leave until dawn,” Shane explained. “The store’s not secure.”
Silence, considering.
“Look,” Shane reasoned, a splinter of irritation in his voice now, “we just want a place to spend the night and patch ourselves up. It’s been…” — he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cool finish of the wood, suddenly weary — “It’s been a long day.”
There came a noise from the other side of the door. Muffled, like clothes rustling, or moth wings batting softly against the other side.
“How many of you are there?” the voice inquired.
“Two,” Shane told her, hoping that didn’t sound like much of a threat. “My 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 difficult thing to do… getting it through all that bone.” Another shake of the head, and then the words seemed to dry up inside her.
She set the knife down as if wary of it.
A long, uncomfortable silence fell over the room.
“Are you sure that’s what you really want?” Larry asked, his voice firm, unmistakable.
Melinda nodded, her dark hair hanging in a stringy veil. “I’ve been here for a long time. Weeks and weeks it seems… and the people who come here are either dead or worse… like desperate animals. They take what they want and then leave. They kill each other over things that don’t matter anymore. I saw a man kill his wife because she dropped a bottle of whisky. It was an accident… she was opening her backpack to put some chocolate bars inside and the bottle just slipped and smashed on the floor.” Her voice began to crack, as if the incident were still very vivid in her mind. “The man went crazy then. He had a big metal flashlight in his hand and he started screaming. He hit her over the head with it.” She shuddered, her eyes tightly shut against the horror of it. “The sound it made… and he kept hitting her with it, even after the light stopped working.”
Wormwood Page 23