Wormwood (23 page)

The impulse left him.  It flapped its evil wings and flew away.

Exhausted, he reached out and touched the trembling curve of her spine.  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

She turned, sobbing, into his arms.

38

“How’s Dad doing?” Shane asked, surprised to find his mother still awake, curled up with a blanket on the couch.  It occurred to him as the question left his mouth that the situation could not have improved.  That she was afraid to sleep with him in case the fever or the infection took over and he died during the night.

It reminded him of the poisoned days before their separation, except then it had been his father who had been banished to the couch, the television flickering late into the night.

Pam sat up, squinting against the flashlight, and he turned it away, toward the same television, which was only gathering dust these days.  “You should be sleeping,” she said, stifling a yawn.

“I’m too wound up,” Shane said, sitting down beside her.  She touched his hair, combing it back from his face, and he asked her again about his father.

“He’s sleeping,” she answered, as if this were the best they might hope for.  “I took his temperature a while ago and it’s come down a little.  Not much, but enough for him to sleep.”

A drowsy quiet settled over them, like falling dust.  Each lost in their own thoughts.

“I’ve been thinking about what Mr. Cheng said,” Shane confessed, his face troubled and upset.

“Mr. Cheng said quite a bit,” Pam agreed, smiling at him wanly.  “He gave us all something to think about.”

“What he said about the antibiotics,” Shane frowned, “about them not working.”  He looked at her.  “You don’t think that’s true, do you?”

She opened her mouth to tell him no, of course not, but the words wouldn’t come.  The truth, now that she’d had time to think about it, was that she didn’t know, and that’s what she told him.  Not out of a selfish desire to keep him at home, but because he was her son and he deserved the truth, not a mother’s comforting lie, however well-meaning.  “This disease,” she told him, “may be affecting
all
of us; not just the people who die, but
everyone
, right now; and since we don’t know anything about it, it’s hard to say how it will affect healing drugs like antibiotics.  They may work fine… or they may not.  We won’t know for sure until we try.”

He nodded, seeming to understand and to accept this.

The next worry on his mind was even harder to speak.

“What if Dad dies while I’m gone?” he said, hitting her own fears squarely on the head.

“He’s
not
going to die,” she told him, her expression changing, cracking and hardening like flowing lava.

Shane pressed his lips together.  “He
might
,” he said softly.

She wanted to tell him to stop being ridiculous, that the loss of two fingers was by no means a life-threatening injury, but again she couldn’t.  The words got caught in her throat.  The days of modern medicine were over, rotting slowly on the shelves.  In another year or two they would be back to the Dark Ages, back to bleedings and leeches.  In some ways, with the power gone, they were already there.

“She looked at him and decided on doubtful.  “It’s
doubtful
,” she told him, brushing away a tear.  “What’s your point?”

Again he hesitated, as if what was in his mind was too terrible to say aloud, in spite of everything they’d been through.  “Will you…” he started, then looked away and tried again, from another angle.  “If he
does
die, will you be able to take care of him?”

This confused her at first, and then a slow, shuddering chill crept up her back.

“I don’t want you to worry about that,” she told him, feeling ill at ease, as if Michael’s corpse —
Stop that!  He’s not a corpse!
— were sitting in the dark with them, listening.  “I’ll do whatever I have to do,” she assured him.

“You’ll have to shoot him,” Shane went on, as if he hadn’t heard her, his voice black and brittle, as if the words were small pieces of bile or dead tissue clotting up inside him.  “Shoot him in the head like we shot those men under the bridge.  Then you’ll have to burn his body…”

“
Shane
,” she said, his face blurred in the stilted light beyond her tears.  “Shane, stop it!”

“…get some wood from behind the garage or anything that’ll burn…”

“Stop it! 
Stop it!
” she shrieked, balling her fists and battering his upper arm and shoulder as if he were an appliance that wouldn’t turn off.  A washing machine that was scarring her new vinyl floor.

Surprised, he stopped.  He looked at her as if awakening from a trance.

Then burst into tears.

39

Not far away, behind a door at the end of the hall, Mike Dawley surfaced briefly from sleep, the remains of a dream dissolving around him, moving off and rearranging itself beyond the borders of the bed.  He felt something cold resting on his eyelids: two coins that slid off his cheeks to the mattress as he tried to sit up.  He felt blindly along the sheet for them, but like the dream they too seemed to disappear.

A moment later he forgot what he was looking for and leaned back against his pillow.

Something was in the room with him, something that watched at the foot of the bed but did not stir.

He reached out with his good hand.  “Pam?”

He knew at once that it wasn’t Pam.

The shape he saw in his mind’s eye was a corpse.  It was Helen Iverson, grinning and pointing a gun at his head, waiting to return a favor.  She had put the pennies on his eyes.

“Go away,” he told her, searching again for the lost coins, wanting to throw them at her.  “I’m not going to die!”

She turned and faded into the surrounding darkness, a smile still touching her lips, as if they both knew better.

40

In the reinforced bunker beneath his basement stairs, Larry Hanna found his wife and son almost exactly as he’d left them.  She was stroking Mark’s hair, which had grown wet with a rancid perspiration, rocking him back and forth while he slept, as if he were a doll she couldn’t bear to part with.

The scratches and welts on Mark’s back, still visible through the rips in his dampened shirt, looked much worse in the artificial light.  They looked angry, infected; not so much like juniper scratches, but fingernail rakes.

He wondered if they had come from an effort to save his brother.

Either way, it wouldn’t do to let them fester.  They ought to be cleaned with disinfectant, covered perhaps.

Larry sat down and told his wife his plans for the morning.

She continued her rocking and gazed through him as if he weren’t there.

“Jan?” he said softly, leaning closer, searching for the place where her eyes were focused but not finding it.  “Did you hear what I said?”

There was no response, just the same compulsive rocking.

When he tried to take Mark away from her, she started to scream.

Part Six:

Traveling

1

The second day of the plague dawned hazy and red, the air sharp with smoke from fires that had burned throughout the night.  A gray veil hung over the city, a stagnant inversion that kept the sharpness from rising or blowing away.

Rudy closed the window and let the curtain fall, wondering how many bodies had gone up in smoke during the night?  How many he was taking in with each breath?

He turned and looked at his wife, still sleeping.

His hair and clothes smelled of the pyre, a greasy, queasy smell that he was unlikely to forget.  He wondered about taking a shower and decided he could use one.  The street was quiet and he could be in and out in five minutes; as cold as the water was, five minutes would be about all he could take.

When he came out — still toweling, trying to rub the goosebumps away — Aimee was awake, sitting up in bed with her robe on.  She told him the children were still sleeping, that she’d just been in their rooms to check on them.  He nodded and dressed himself quickly in fresh, clean-smelling clothes.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, looking at him as if it were a perfectly normal Sunday morning.  “Should I fix you some breakfast?”

Rudy considered it, tempted, and shook his head.  He reminded her that Larry and Shane were going into town.  He would need to help them get the motorcycle ready, make preparations… a bowl of cold cereal with powdered milk would be enough, and he could make that himself.

“In that case,” she yawned, “I think I’ll sleep a little longer.”

He kissed her and went downstairs, leaving the rising sunlight for the subterranean feel of the rooms below.  He checked the doors and windows, satisfying himself that no one had tried to break in during the night, then sat down at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cheerios and some leftover pineapple, which he ate straight from the can.  The water from the faucet looked murky, unsettled, and he dumped it down the drain without tasting it, thinking God knew what might have fallen into the reservoir.

He mixed the milk with bottled water and ate quickly, depressed by the dim surroundings.  When he was finished, he put the dishes in the sink (not even wanting to rinse them with the dingy tap water) and, taking the pistol Aimee had left atop the entertainment center, went outside to see if Larry and Shane were awake yet.

2

There was a dog in the cul-de-sac, a black and white border collie that was trying to pull something out of the scorched heap of the pyre.

“Hey!” Rudy shouted, taking an unguarded step toward the street.  “Get away from there! 
Heyah
!”  He made wild shooing motions with his free hand, his heels clipping down the walk.  “Go on!”

The collie skittered back, startled, retreating down the street as far as the Dawley’s before looking back to see if Rudy was giving chase.  When it saw that he wasn’t, the dog came to a stop, ears up and alert.

“Keep going!” Rudy told it, throwing out his arm once again, a gesture no longer so threatening from sixty feet away.

The dog stood and watched him.  It glanced at the smoldering remains of the pyre, licked its muzzle, and then looked at Rudy once again.  Rudy had no desire to shoot it, but neither did he care to watch it drag bone after bone out of the cooling ashes, making a meal out of people he once knew.

He held the pistol over his head and fired it into the air, setting off a bang that echoed in the morning silence of the surrounding hills.  The collie bolted; not down the street, but into the gap between the Iverson’s and the Navaro’s, where Rudy lost sight of it.

A door opened to his right; Shane in jeans and a black t-shirt, a rifle in his hand.  He looked at Rudy questioningly.