He was a little disappointed at what he found inside. There was no loft or comfortable piles of hay to take refuge in, but rather a sleeping tractor and a dull gray collection of heavy implements to drag behind it. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the gloomy interior, he saw faded bags of chemical fertilizer, a work bench littered with oily pieces of machinery, a pair of paint-spattered sawhorses, and an old fruit bin filled with tortured lengths of applewood… but nothing more inviting to rest his head upon than the cold, hard ground.
Arriving at this unhappy conclusion, Shane started to turn and heard the unmistakable double-click of a shotgun at his back.
That was how he met Marie Barrow.
3
Surveying Quail Street with a critical (almost detached) eye, Shane guessed the fire had started at the Cheng’s, the prevailing winds sweeping down the hill and spreading it south toward Kennedy. It had devoured everything on the west side of the cul-de-sac while ignoring everything on the east; all except a corner of Larry’s garage, which was withered and blackened but still very much intact.
“Which one was yours?” Marie asked, her hand still in Shane’s as they walked to the smudged remains of the funerary pyre, then came to an uneasy halt.
Shane pointed to a collapsed pile which had fallen gracelessly into its own foundation. He had no desire to get any closer; at least, not yet. Other things might become evident in the wreckage upon closer inspection. Things he wasn’t ready to see.
“I’m sure they made it out,” Marie gently suggested, plucking the image from his mind as if she wished to erase it. She turned slightly on her heel, taking in the houses behind her, the Iverson’s and the Navaro’s. She further suggested that they might have taken shelter in one of the remaining homes.
Shane shook his head. He had grasped at this possibility as well, but now it seemed hollow. “Where are they?” he asked, releasing her hand and spreading his arms. He turned a slow circle along the edge of the pyre. “They would have heard the motorcycle. They would have come out by now.”
She glanced around the cul-de-sac and sighed, agreeing with a reluctant nod, her damp brown hair shifting on the breeze, her cheeks still flushed from the ride.
“Unless…” Shane murmured, his eyes turning, lit with a bright glimmer of hope.
“Unless what?” Marie frowned, but Shane was already moving, running toward the door of the nearest house. The one with the singed garage.
Confused and alarmed, she ran after him.
4
Marie Barrow had been alone in her house for 15 days.
The first week had been spent waiting for her father to return from her aunt and uncle’s, a round trip of less than eight miles. At the end of that week, Wormwood had fallen out of the sky like God’s final judgment and Marie had come to the hard realization that her father wasn’t coming back. That something had happened to him along the way.
In the dark days since that realization, she began to wait for something else. She didn’t know exactly who or what that something might be, but her father had left his shotgun, along with plenty of ammunition, food, and water to fill the lonely days until she decided.
She had seen the motorcycle and its two riders pass along the road the previous day, without stopping or seeming to take notice of the house at all. She had watched it from her bedroom window until it was swallowed by a shaggy copse of willows, and then she had watched the willow branches sway until the beelike sound of the engine’s passage had faded to a distant drone.
Good, she thought, letting the curtain fall back into place, the room resuming its former cast, which was a dusky shade of brown, like an antique photograph. There would have been no room on the motorbike for an extra rider, and the simple fact that they outnumbered her two-to-one was reason enough to fear them.
But then the following day the bike came back. It was the same one, she was sure of it, only now one of the riders was gone. Disappeared just like her father.
The engine sputtered in the pale blue twilight and a dark lump of fear clotted in her chest as she watched the rider dismount and push the bike toward her along the long gray line of the driveway.
Marie left the window long enough to get her father’s shotgun. She broke it open and checked the breach, making certain both barrels were loaded.
She hesitated, wondering if the stranger would have a gun of his own, then decided it didn’t matter.
One way or another, her long wait would be over.
5
Shane rapped on the door of Larry Hanna’s former house and, when no one answered, tried the door handle. It was locked, of course, but this in no way discouraged him; on the contrary, he took it as a hopeful sign, a minor obstacle.
By this time Marie was standing beside him. Her eyes grew wide as he stepped back and put his shoulder to the door, hitting it once… twice… three times before pausing to reconsider his options. The frame and the deadbolt felt like welded steel, like something he could go on butting until his shoulder turned black.
“Whose house is this?” Marie wondered, squinting up at the second story windows, the light spray of freckles on her nose wrinkling.
“The Hanna’s,” Shane answered, searching around the step for a tool he might use to get past the lock. “Larry’s,” he added, the word slipping out under his breath.
“The man who went with you to Fred Meyer?”
Shane nodded. He hit the door twice more and found himself no closer to breaking it down than he had on the first try. He thought about using his shotgun on the deadbolt and then thought better of it, his eyes settling on one of the plywood-covered windows.
“Why do you want inside?” Marie asked, quietly pointing out the fact that if anyone on Quail Street had survived, they surely would have heard him battering on the door.
“Not if they’re inside the bomb shelter,” he said, moving along the front of the house. He was too busy testing the grip of the nails on the first sheet of plywood to notice her expression.
“Bomb shelter?”
“Yeah,” Shane nodded, grimacing as the plywood began to creak. Encouraged, he glanced over at her.
“C’mere and give me a hand with this.”
6
Even in the gloomy light of the barn she could see his guns, though they didn’t frighten her. It was reasonable to travel with guns these days. Sensible. So instead of the guns she studied his face. He was younger than she’d first imagined; younger, perhaps, than herself. She had frightened him, and that was reasonable too, considering where he was standing, but now that he’d turned he was regaining his composure.
Marie watched his eyes and found that they gazed steadily back at her. They did not pretend to meet her own or slide from side to side, plotting and planning. Likewise, his feet remained at a satisfied distance.
“What do you want?” she asked, the shotgun pointed at his chest.
“Nothing,” he told her. “Only a place to rest… to get off the road for the night.”
She sensed that he was telling the truth, a truth not only in his words, but in his eyes.
“Is it dangerous at night?” she asked, feeling the urge to glance back at the darkness settling over the fields behind her. Feeling it like a maddening itch between her shoulderblades.
“It’s dangerous all the time.”
She nodded, as if she suspected this also was true, and they studied one another for a long moment.
“I don’t mean you any harm,” he said, his eyes dropping briefly to indicate the shotgun. “I thought the house was empty.”
“Did you?” Marie sensed this was not entirely the truth, but neither was it a lie. Perhaps it was something he didn’t entirely understand himself. She lowered the barrel an inch or two. “What’s your name?”
“Shane,” he answered.
“Shane,” she repeated, her voice stepping back, turning inward. The name conjured up images of old television westerns and leather-skinned gunfighters. The hot, flat glare of the sun and
a dusty place where death was never far away. Marie decided that he had gunfighter’s eyes: a dark shade of gray now, but in the sunlight they would turn to an overcast and guarded blue. She felt herself drawn to him and decided to trust that feeling. She lowered the muzzle of the shotgun to the hard and oily ground.
“The house isn’t empty,” she told him, “but it’s too big for just one person.” She tried on a hesitant smile. “I’ve felt like a ghost rattling around inside.” The smile faded until only her hesitancy remained. “If what you say is true… if you really don’t mean any harm, then you might as well come inside for the night.”
Shane nodded, grateful, and followed her in.
7
He missed the door on the first pass, not knowing where the shelter was; hearing about it secondhand from his parents and Rudy Cheng, and then only briefly, as if it were a grave or sepulcher they’d rather not think about. Shane himself had been imagining something in the basement, like a submarine hatch: something leading deeper into the earth. After several minutes of fruitless searching, he came back to the bend in the stairs and the door seemed to pop out at him. At first he thought it was a storage nook — a cramped, cobwebby space filled with old clothes and Christmas decorations — but on second glance, the door looked much too wide for that. Much too solid.
He glanced questioningly at Marie. “Is this it?”
She shrugged, telling him she’d never seen a bomb shelter before.
Tentatively, Shane touched the handle. The door felt suddenly very thick, as if it might open on a bank vault. When he tried to open it, the heavy steel handle didn’t budge. It felt welded into place.
“I think this is it,” he murmured, taking his hand away and looking at his palm in the faint fall of daylight that trickled down the stairs. The burnished steel had felt cold, and now he wondered if the space behind it had become a tomb. He’d overheard Larry ask Mr. Cheng to take care of his family, but walking through the quiet ruins of the cul-de-sac, that didn’t mean much anymore. Nor would he get beyond this bend in the stairs if there was no one left alive to unlock the door and let him in.
“Try knocking,” Marie suggested, suppressing a shiver. There was a coldness creeping up the stairs from the basement.
Shane raised a fist and knocked. The sound hardly seemed to scratch the surface; it was like rapping his knuckles against a large shelf of bedrock, painful and utterly senseless.
“This isn’t going to work,” he muttered, frowning. “We need something solid, like a hammer or a good-sized wrench.”
“There’s a hammer upstairs,” Marie informed him. “It’s lying on the table with a bunch of loose nails.”
“That’ll work,” Shane nodded. “Would you go get it?”
With a flip of her hair, she disappeared up the stairs.
8
“What about your mother?” Shane asked.
“She’s dead,” Marie replied, sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up to her chin while Shane sat cross-legged on the floor, his back against the wall. “She died of cancer when I was eight. Dad and I have been living here alone ever since.” She turned wistfully toward the window, which was hung with a sheet of black tarpaulin so the candlelight stayed within the room. “Now I suppose he’s gone, too.”
Shane didn’t offer an opinion on that one way or the other; it was hard to say what happened to people once they started wandering away from home. He wolfed a spoonful of Nalley’s chili straight out of the can, savoring it like ambrosia; it seemed perfectly suited to fill the nagging hole inside him. In days past, he’d imagined that cold chili must taste something like dog food; they looked and smelled almost the same. That part of him seemed very distant now.
“You know… just lately, before you showed up, I’d gotten to the point where I’d almost begun to envy dead people.”
Shane paused in his eating and looked up at her, surprised.
“Oh not the ones who are still walking around,” she clarified, “but those who have already lived full lives and died before this ever happened. They’re the lucky ones, even my mom. I mean, she was only thirty, but she never had to worry about anything called Wormwood.”
Shane considered her strange thread of logic as he took another bite from the open can, working it down slowly, thoughtfully. “I’m sure she had her own worries, just like everyone else.”
“Maybe,” Marie allowed, “but they’re over now.”
Shane couldn’t help laughing. “That’s a very backward way of looking at life.”
“I suppose so, but it almost seems like…” — Marie sighed — “I don’t know, money in the bank to me. There’s something very comforting about it.”
“Like an iron-clad guarantee?” Shane suggested, still smiling.
Marie’s whole face lit up. “Yes! That exactly right! A guarantee!”
“That would be nice,” Shane nodded.
They fell into a comfortable silence as he finished his chili, Marie watching him eat with a satisfied air, as if she had cooked and canned the meal herself. She played with the white flannel hem of her nightgown in an absentminded way, wondering when he would notice her legs. In the short time she had known him Marie decided that she wanted to be with Shane, if he would have her. Feeding him was one thing, but she had something else in mind that was more persuasive, more certain.
Still, she didn’t want him thinking that she was a whore, available to any man who happened by. It had to seem like his idea, or something that happened between them.
“Shane?”
He looked up at her, his thoughts interrupted, scattered like dead leaves. He looked relieved, and then his eyes dipped down to a bare length of thigh. Smooth, firm and white. She tucked her nightgown under her leg as if brushing back a fallen lock of hair, then shook her head.
“Nothing.” She seemed embarrassed and her eyes dropped to the folds of the bed. “Never mind.”
“What?” he prodded, looking at her in the candlelight. Her hair was loose, casting soft shadows over her face. The glimpse of her bare leg was still with him.
She shook her head again, rearranging the golden threads in her hair. “Nothing,” she insisted, hesitating. “You’ll think it’s silly.”
“No, I won’t,” he assured her, the vision in his head catching fire now. He reached out for her hand.
She looked at him.
“Will you hold me? Just for a little while?”
He got to his knees and crawled to the bed, folding her inside his arms.
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.
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