Wormwood (32 page)

“That was different,” she said sullenly.  “Those were
blunt
.”

“So’s a hammer.”

“Not blunt enough,” she said, shaking her head.

Larry shrugged.  “Suit yourself.”  He tested the weight of the post, hefting it in the palm of his hand, balancing it like a javelin.  “Maybe you can find yourself a cast-iron frying pan in Housewares, or a marble rolling pin.”

The dead man was closing, tottering around a pyramidal paint display to within 10 or 12 yards of the registers.  He began to moan eagerly, his arms outstretched, climbing through the stale air.

The steel post poised at his shoulder, Larry took a few running steps and hurled it through the man’s skull with a savage grunt.  The sound it made as it passed through his eye socket and into the fevered meat of his brain was crisp, like an apple bite.  A faint spray of blood fanned across the aisle and the paint display swallowed him whole, the fence post jutting out of the fallen mound like a victory spike or a flagpole.  A miniature Iwo Jima.

“Can we go now?” Shane asked, his tone impatient and unimpressed.

2

The pharmacy counter was near the back of the store, sandwiched between Housewares and the magazine display.  From where they stood (on the fringes of Lawn and Garden) they would have to travel through the forgotten lands of Hardware, Home Improvement, Sporting Goods, and finally Housewares before reaching the pharmacy.

“We can go about this a couple different ways, Larry said, extending a pointing finger toward the back of the store, toward a darkness that was more complete than in any other direction.  “Straight back that way and along the back wall, or…” — he gestured to a wide aisle that traversed the entire width of the store like a wax-buffed interstate — “down that way, and then back.”

“What does it matter?” Rachel asked, a malletlike hammer in her hands, the head smothered nervously in her palm.  “Just pick a direction and
go
.”

Larry looked at her, a fresh fence post propped against his shoulder.  “Standing
here
, it doesn’t make a bit of difference,” he said, annoyed at being challenged by her at every step, “but if we get into trouble, it might be nice to have something useful near at hand.  Something sharp or heavy.”  He tipped his head toward the dark quarter.  “If we go
that
way, we’re more likely to find items of that nature.  If we go the other…” he shrugged.  “Who knows?  We may find nothing on the shelves but greeting cards and tampons.”

Rachel smiled sardonically and shook her head.  “Greeting cards, yes, but I guarantee you’re not going to find any tampons in this store.  Not this one or any other.”

Larry opened his mouth to say something, then promptly shut it, flustered and embarrassed, waving the point aside as inconsequential.  “It doesn’t matter.  If we go down the center aisle we’re more open to ambush; if we go across the back, we’ve at least got the wall to one side.”  He hesitated.  “Plus, I’m not exactly certain where to cut back to get to the pharmacy.”

Rachel sighed.  “Well why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”

3

The small penlights they’d brought were not up to the task of illuminating the aisles, at least not in a manner with which they felt comfortable.  The beams were weak and yellowy, dissolving into the general gloom and imparting a grainy, suffocating quality, like being trapped under an old woolen blanket.  Dark shapes forever fluttered on the threshold of vision; inconstant ghosts that shied away with every step.

At the same time, the flares that Shane had picked up along the roadside weren’t ideal either.  At the drop of the first one, it became obvious that they would be of limited use.  On the move, the influence of their light was short-lived, and in the end they acted more like beacons than anything else.  Better — Larry decided, once this became apparent — to use them as distractions, things for the dead to fight over amongst themselves.

So they used the penlights to make their way to the pharmacy, tripping over the occasional item that had been left in the aisles: cans of spray paint and WD-40, golf balls and wooden dowels; an avalanche of galvanized nails; items that had been picked up and discarded or simply knocked off the shelves by clumsy browsers.  The nails had a knack of hiding from their flashlights then rolling silently underfoot, bringing short, sharp screams out of Rachel and dark expletives from Shane and Larry.  Slow, dragging footsteps shadowed them, accompanied by despairing moans that seemed born out of the air itself, without source or direction.

They crept past an aisle stocked with plumbing and electrical supplies, then made a 90-degree turn around a customer service kiosk mounted with paint shakers, silent and useless in this dead, black corner.

A slack arm reached out of a gap in the back of the kiosk, its pale form uncovered suddenly by Shane’s penlight: bare to the elbow and flecked with spatters of paint or dried blood.  It lay along the floor like a dead snake, the fingers splayed and partially eaten, nibbled slightly about the nails then left to rot.

They made a wide pass around it, as if suspecting it might not be completely dead.  Shane shone his light into the gap and a wave of nausea rolled out like a black tongue, pebbled and swollen and as dry as a reptile.  Two eyes gazed up from the pale edge of the beam: shriveled, sunken into screaming hollows, yet watchful all the same.

They left it to the darkness, to the blooming stench of its own decay.

Home Improvement gradually changed to Home Décor.  Tables and chairs, lamps and throw pillows, photograph frames and silent clocks.

Shane swept his flashlight in a low arc and Rachel gasped, freezing in step behind him.  Just before Larry bumped into her, he had an impression of Death staring back at him: a white face floating in the aisles.  He focused his light on it and Rachel screamed against the knuckles of her free hand.

“Richard, oh my
God
!” she cried and the mallet dropped to the floor like a silly and useless toy. 
“Richard!”

She ran to her husband, clipping a straight-backed chair with her hip and knocking it over.

“No, don’t!”
Larry shouted, his voice swallowed by the vast acreage of the store. 
“Rachel!”

Shane made a grab for her as she darted past, lost his grip on the penlight, and a black and gloomy curtain dropped suddenly in front of him.  The light tumbled down his pantleg and he inadvertently kicked it down the aisle.  It spun past Rachel and her husband and came to rest illuminating a damaged group of figures shuffling slowly up the aisle.

“We’ve got problems!” Shane shouted, taking the axe in both hands.  He brushed past Rachel after the fallen flashlight, more afraid of being left in the dark at that moment than anything else.  Despite everything he’d been through, the dead shapes seemed somehow unreal within the confines of the store; they seemed more like disgruntled mannequins than any serious threat.

Larry, however, knew better, and his voice as he shouted after Shane was red with alarm.  The fence post he’d brought along was poised above his shoulder, but there was no clear target; nothing he could do but shout.

He took a tentative step toward Rachel as she pushed away from her husband’s embrace, a shrill scream spreading out of her like a shock wave, knocking everything back a beat.  In the cone of Larry’s penlight, Richard Walker’s mouth had become crimson, almost clownlike.  Then the red from his lips ran down his chin and the deadness in his eyes rolled over.  It changed into the unmistakable face of Wormwood.

Rachel screamed and pressed her hand to her shoulder, trying to stop the blood even as it pulsed through the cracks between her fingers.  She broke free of her husband’s grasp and took a blind step back, tripping over the chair she’d upended in her unthinking rush to meet him.  The spot of Larry’s flashlight followed her down, shocked at the amount of blood already pouring down the front of her blouse; at the terrible wound gaping at the base of her neck; a raw, red mouth that screamed in blood instead of sound.

Richard Walker looked through the light at Larry, then down at his wife, ribbons of frank red blood slipping out of his mouth and pattering against the tops of his shoes.

Further down the aisle, around the glow of the fallen penlight, shadows began to merge and flicker.  He heard Shane grunt; saw the swing of the axe, and something fell to the floor like a sodden dishrag.  A man with a bald and gleaming head fell to his knees, his guts rolling out of him in silver coils.  Shane swung the axe again and his bald head disappeared, swallowed by the darkness crouched further down the aisle.

Rachel struggled to sit up, to untangle her legs from the chair as her husband bent over her with all the grace of a man struck with a debilitating arthritis.  She screamed, her voice bubbling, and Larry planted his post in the top of Walker’s head.

The dead man reeled back, looking absurdly like a human lightning rod.  His feet shuffled a few last steps then the bright green post swept one of the shelves as he fell, taking down a collection of picture frames.  Oak and metal and glass clacked over like dominos, burying him beneath a spill of airbrushed faces.  Models so pleasing and pure they almost made you sad to replace them with your own imperfect snapshots and relations.

Larry heard Shane swear as something heavy fell and smashed to pieces, but for the moment his eyes were on Rachel, who was swimming in a puddle of her own blood, trying desperately to stay afloat.  He knelt down as she opened her mouth and tried to speak.  What came out of her lips was little more than a whisper, a dark understanding of the way things were.

She saw herself caught in the sympathetic reflection of his eyes.  Pinned and dying there.

“Don’t…” she struggled, painting an angel’s wing on the polished tiles.  “Don’t let it happen to me.  I don’t,” — she coughed and Larry flinched, his face speckled with dots he quickly wiped away — “I don’t want to turn into one of
those
.”  Her eyes seemed to strain toward her husband, toward the shapes falling in the center of the aisle.  Her hand moved, grasping Larry’s forearm. 
“Promise me,”
she implored, then her breath touched his cheek and she died before he could answer, her grip on him slowly relaxing.

Larry took his arm back and got to his feet, afraid her eyes would snap suddenly back open.  He stepped over her with a hand on his revolver, ready to pull it from its holster at the slightest hint of movement.  It had taken a minute or two for his own wife to cross over, down in the grim light of the bomb shelter, but he wasn’t certain that that held true for everyone.  Some might take longer and some might take less, and at the moment he wasn’t in a mood for gambling.  There were worse places to die than the Home Décor section of Fred Meyer, but there were surely better places as well.

Slipping on the fallen frames, the glass panes cracking beneath his weight, Larry grasped the post he’d left with Rachel’s husband and, bracing a foot against his skull, pulled it free with a sickened grunt.  In the back of his mind, he recalled those British vampire pictures he and his older brother used to watch as kids: the ones that always started with some fool pulling a wooden stake out of a decrepit old coffin.

Walker, however, seemed content to stay where he was.  There was no unearthly luminescence within the wound, no swirl of ashes eager to paste him back together, so Larry let him be and carried the post back over to Rachel.

She was just as he’d left her, her face slack, eyes gazing up at the place where he’d been kneeling.  Without ceremony or sentiment, he put the point of the shaft against the smooth white curve of her forehead.  Gripping it with both hands, he closed his eyes and dropped his weight down sharply, like a man falling through a trapdoor to Hell.

There was a moment of hesitation, a stubborn crack, and the post dropped a few final inches, enough to carry the point deep into the stirring tissue of her brain.

Larry exhaled, a sheen of sweat clinging to his pale brow.  When he opened his eyes, Shane was standing over him, splattered with blood, the axe hanging loosely in one hand and the reclaimed penlight in the other.  Larry thought he looked about forty years older.