Wormwood (31 page)

The man fell amid the withering petals of his petunias and geraniums and troubled them no more.  There were, however, others to take his place: long shadows staggering around the corners of the building, each one a walking horror.  More than they had bullets enough to fix.

And the doors, of course, once they got there, stubbornly refused them entrance.  Locked, or left without power; prying them apart would take valuable time, yet to outright smash their way inside would be an invitation for all to follow.

Larry swore and pounded the reinforced glass with his fist.  He estimated they had ammunition to survive another four, maybe five minutes.  “Look for something to pry these damn things apart!” he shouted, surprised at the heat, the raw desperation behind the command.  He had thought that part of him dead, pruned away with his wife and sons, but it seemed that there was life in him yet, or simply an unwillingness to fall amid the stacks of manure and potting soil.  It was no place for a man to die, to spend an uncertain eternity wandering about.

One of the teenagers from the north entrance came prowling around the corner, his gait light and unaffected, like the blonde boy Shane had tangled with on the other side of the river.  He came running at them so fast that Larry wondered if he was infected at all.  From what he could see, there wasn’t a mark on his body; just an odd lilt to the left side of his head, as if he’d fallen asleep with a head full of styling gel and his curly brown hair had flattened against the pillow.

The blonde woman from the SUV screamed when she saw him.  A short, shrill blast that took flight across the parking lot, hit the cinderblocks surrounding the trailer park, and squawked back at them.  Without a gun or a club, she picked up a good-sized clay pot and flung it at him.  It was a lucky throw (or else she was experienced in tossing them), striking him squarely on the knee and knocking his leg out from under him as he stumbled to within 5 or 6 feet of them.  While he was down, she snatched up another and brought it down on his head with the strength of both arms.

Larry winched at the dull crunch that accompanied the demise of the pot, which left the kid’s head looking as flat on top as a broken plate.  The boy looked up at her — almost a reflex, Larry thought, raising his gun– but the woman picked up another pot.

“Will
this
work?” Shane wondered, the sound of clay shattering as Larry turned to regard the proffered head of a garden hoe.  A brightly-painted blade on a varnished length of ash.

Larry assumed he meant as a weapon, nodded his head vaguely then remembered the door.

“Go ahead and try it,” he shouted, then fired his revolver at a black man who looked like he’d spent the past two weeks suffocating under a hot front porch.  His skin was mottled and blue, the flesh beneath swollen too tight for him to wear.  Like a balloon man, all the creases of a man approaching forty had been erased and distended, and when the bullet struck there was a sound like gas escaping from a torn bladder.

Shane set his shotgun across an open flat of seed packets and went to work on the crack between the doors, the sound bright and torturous, like a giant bird in its death throes.

The black man tried to crawl to his feet and received a clay crown for all his effort.  He farted one last time beneath the impact and then lay still, as if the gas had been the only thing keeping him going.  A nauseating stench, like mounds of dead chickens, drifted over them and Larry began to retch, only barely keeping the meal he’d eaten at the bridge down.  He turned to see if Shane was making any progress on the doors.

“Why don’t you just
break
it?” the woman shrieked, a dark splash of blood soiling her blouse.  She picked up the last pot on display as if to do just that.

“Don’t!”
Larry shouted, holding out an arm like a policeman halting traffic.  “If you break it they’ll come in after us!”

“They’re
already
in!” she contended, still brandishing the pot.  “My husband smashed one of the doors in front and I saw some of them follow him in!”

At this, Shane ceased his exertions with the hoe and looked questioningly at Larry.

“Great,” Larry murmured, his shadow deflating against the wall.  “That’s just great.”  He looked at the woman as if she were somehow responsible.  A turn of bad luck they had unwittingly taken in.  “Which door did he break?”

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.”