Wormwood (40 page)

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.’”