Wormwood (34 page)

“So don’t take the whole box.  Take half, or a third; whatever you need.  The needles should be capped.  There’s no sense hauling back two hundred syringes if you’re only going to make a few injections.”

“Yeah,” Shane realized.  “I’m gonna have to.”  Larry heard him unzip his pack.  “How’re you doing out there?  It sounds awfully noisy.”

“Well, we’ve got
two
new friends at the moment,” Larry shouted.  “I’d like to get out of this cage before we pick up any more. 
Two
we can take care of; more than that and it starts to get dicey.”

“Almost done,” Shane assured him, his backpack zipping again, though reluctantly, as if he’d like to take more.  A moment later his feet came sliding over the counter, the pack riding up against his neck as he slipped down beside Larry, as lumpy as a pillowcase stuffed with bricks.

“Looks like you just about cleaned them out,” Larry commented, eyeing the pack as Shane reached for his axe.

“Hardly,” Shane grunted.  “This is just a skim off the top.  You never know… someone else will probably need these drugs just as bad as we do, and I’d hate to have come all this way to find some asshole had cleaned out the shelves, taking more than he needed or could carry.”

“You’re a good kid, Shane,” Larry nodded, impressed.  “No,
seriously
.  We’ve lived next door to one another for years and I don’t think I ever realized that.”  He offered a passing smile.  “It makes me sorry we never got to know one another.”

“I’d say we made up for that today,” Shane said, his face bright pink in the light of the flare.  “We’ve just about been joined at the hip.”

“Thank God for that,” Larry nodded, laughing.  “I don’t know what I’d’ve done if I’d been cooped up in that house today.”  A small shudder passed through him.  “I don’t even like to think about it.”

“So don’t.”  Shane clipped his penlight to his shirt collar, checked his pistol, then took a firm hold on his axe.  “Think about how we’re going to get to the manager’s office.”  He gazed at the darkness on the other side of the flare.  “And where it might be.”

“That’s no mystery.  It’s at the front of the store.”  He nodded past Court and Julia.  “Straight ahead, past the checkout lanes, then down a narrow hallway past the bathrooms.”

Shane cast him a sidelong glance.  “It sounds like you’ve been there before.”

Larry shrugged.  “I’ve never been
inside
… but a man’s got to occupy himself somehow while his wife’s in the powder room.”

“I guess so,” Shane nodded, his smile fading as he looked at the two obstacles they’d have to cut through to even get started.  Court he’d seen, but the woman…  He guessed she’d been pretty once, before Wormwood got a hold of her; maybe even beautiful.

The axe in his hands suddenly seemed much too heavy-handed, a brutal thing, almost obscene.  He immediately recognized the danger of this way of thinking and pawned her off on Larry, who was unholstering his pistol.  Court, on the other hand, could only benefit by the blade.

He tried to make the offer sound magnanimous, as if he were handing Larry a bargain.  Larry, to his credit, accepted this arrangement without a word of protest.

“Ready?”

Shane took a deep breath and nodded.

“Mind where you’re swinging that axe,” Larry cautioned, reaching down with his free hand and getting a grip on the gate.  He took his foot off the lip and rolled it up.

And to his horror and surprise, the barrel of his revolver caught in the blur of passing links and jumped out of his hand.  It tumbled down his leg, off his boot, and clattered away into darkness.

8

“I dropped my gun!”
Larry shrieked as Shane cut into Court’s left shoulder, dropping the dead boy to his knees.  The heavy blade wedged into bone and refused to come out without a fight.  Shane planted a foot against the bagboy’s chest and, twisting the handle, jerked it free, though the release sent him stumbling back against the pharmacy counter.

Julia, in the meantime, fell on Larry like a starving woman.  He tried to push her away but she accepted his splayed fingers and outstretched arms welcomingly, like foreplay, or tender appetizers before the feast.

Larry screamed and the two of them fell in a thrashing tangle.

Shane stepped forward with the axe, raised it over his head, and brought it down with a grunt on Julia’s back, severing her backbone and spinal cord with an audible snap.  Her legs immediately ceased their kicking and scrabbling, but the biting and clawing end of her was still at work as if everything was still good.

Shane raised the axe again, taking a step forward, figuring to aim between her shoulders this time.  He felt something whispery touch his pantleg and, glancing down, saw Court’s palsied fingers feeling blindly for a crease or a seam to grab hold of.

Shane stepped hastily back and brought the axe down, without aim or forethought.  It angled shallowly across Court’s skull, shearing off an ear before sinking into his jaw, dislocating it with a pop that traveled up the handle like a foul ball rolling off a hardwood bat.

Court’s head lolled back, looking worse than ever, his right cheek lumpy and elongated where the hinge had shattered.  His eyes rolled up at Shane’s penlight as if asking God Himself for mercy.

Shane swung the axe again and the prayer was answered.  Court’s head was split down the middle like a rotten coconut, his jaw clinging stubbornly to the stalk of his neck while his hair (and the top of his skull) tumbled away toward the magazine rack.

This distracted him from Larry for perhaps 10 whole seconds, yet in those precious seconds Julia had been hard at work.  She’d fallen across Larry at an angle which best presented his upper left arm to her snapping mouth — the tough weave of bicep and tricep just above the elbow.  As Shane turned back she cut through an artery and a violent red jet sprayed against the front of the pharmacy counter, which only seemed to excite her all the more.

She made a sound like a woman rubbing herself toward climax and Shane, guessing Larry would be dead within seconds, cut her off abruptly at the neck.

9

Rolling Julia’s body aside, Shane looked down at Larry and knew it was over.  He was lying in an obscene amount of his own blood, the jet buried within the frayed meat of his arm now failing, getting weaker with every heartbeat.

Shane slipped off his backpack and unbuckled his belt, pulling it roughly through the loops.  He crouched over Larry — who by now had lost all interest in screaming — and ran the wide strip of leather under the shredded remains of his arm, just beneath the shoulder.  He threaded the tongue through the buckle and pulled it tight against Larry’s armpit.

The rough sound of his own breath whistled through his windpipe as his penlight shone down on Larry’s chest like a spotlight on an empty stage, waiting for an encore.  Larry’s eyelids fluttered, fighting a desperate battle against unconsciousness.

A moan echoed distantly within the cavern of the store and Shane’s head whipped up, eyes searching darkness against the bright pink glare of the road flare.

Larry reached up with his good arm and clutched at Shane’s shirtfront, demanding his attention.  “Am I dying?” he whispered, his eyes swimming, trying to focus.  “I can’t feel anything.”

“I don’t know,” Shane answered hoarsely.  “You’re probably in shock.”  He tipped the end of the penlight toward the damaged portion of Larry’s arm and winced at what he found: a mass of raw flesh and a grimace of denuded bone.  The bleeding, however, seemed to have stopped; but how much longer could he crouch here, holding it?  A new hole would have to be notched in the belt to keep it tight, and then the arm itself would have to be removed or sewn shut.  The punch in the belt Shane thought he might manage; the amputation and closing, however, were a bit beyond the dissections he’d done in Biology.

“Wait a minute…” Larry murmured, a tentative expression rippling across his face, washing away the terror.  “I can feel something now… something
warm
.”  With apparent difficulty, he turned his smiling head to look at the pressure Shane was applying and the fear rushed back.  It crawled up his arm and spread across his face like wildfire.  Beneath his screams, Shane struggled to keep a tight grip on the belt, to keep it from slipping off his shoulder and biting into the wound itself.

“My arm,” Larry grimaced, the fight draining out of him once again, leaving a pale countenance of shock and exhaustion.  “My
arm
…”  He shook his head, eyes squeezed tight.  “What did that bitch do to my arm?”

“Larry? 
Listen
to me.”  Shane took hold of his neighbor’s jaw to keep his head from rolling, his grip becoming tighter, more insistent, until Larry stopped sobbing and looked him in the eye.  “I need to punch a hole in the belt that’s wrapped around your arm and I need to do it
now
.”  He glanced over his shoulder at the sound (still distant) of something crashing down into one of the aisles  An avalanche of small cans or jars over in the grocery section.  He turned back to Larry.  “While I’m doing that I want you to keep pressure on your arm as best you can.  Can you do that?”

Larry was gazing up at him as if he’d lapsed into another language, his breath coming and going in small, shallow sips.

“Larry?”
Shane insisted, raising his voice to a harsh slap as he searched with his free hand for his pocket knife.  “Do you hear me?”

Larry swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, and nodded.  “Yes, I… I can try,” he stuttered, his eyes wide, focusing on the belt as if it were a lifeline, a thin cord tethering him to the earth.

Awkwardly, maintaining pressure on the belt, Shane pried the leather punch out of his Swiss Army knife.  Once he had it extended and locked into place, he took Larry’s free hand and guided it to the pressure point just below the armpit.  “It’s going to bleed,” he warned.  “Try to ignore it and keep pressing as hard as you can.”  Shane took a deep breath, preparing himself, marking a spot high on the belt with his finger then scratching it with the tip of the blade.  “I’ll try to be quick.”

Larry grit his teeth together and his eyes found Shane’s beyond the glare of the penlight.  A sense of resolution or finality settled over him and he nodded.  “Okay.  I’m ready.”

Shane pulled the tongue back through the buckle, tucked the notched end under his knee and leaned his weight onto it.  As fresh red blood began to slip through Larry’s fingers, Shane put the point of the punch on the mark he’d made and — neck straining, his face sewn with shadows — twisted his wrist back and forth, grunting with the effort it took to drive a hole through the seasoned leather.

Eventually, the blade worked its way through.

Shane exhaled and lassoed the belt around Larry’s arm again, his hands slick with blood as he cinched it tight and searched blindly with his fingertips for the new hole to fasten it.

By now Larry was screaming again, his face livid, shining with a sour, queasy sweat.  Shane did his best to ignore it and concentrate on the task at hand, trying to be quick instead of gentle.  Stopping the hemorrhage was the main thing; if Larry was still alive after that… well, they had enough drugs to take the pain away.

The tip of the buckle’s brass tongue caught in the new hole and Shane forced it through, hoping it would be tight enough and he wouldn’t have to repeat the procedure, adding another notch an inch or two higher.

Larry’s eyes rolled lazily into his head and his arm fell limply at the elbow, his fingers grazing Shane’s thigh in passing.  At this point Shane realized he was kneeling on the man’s chest, the whole of his weight pressing down on Larry’s breastbone.

He rolled off thinking that he’d killed him.

Thinking he was suddenly very alone.

And in the wake of this, he realized that if Larry was dead, he wouldn’t be alone for long.  His neighbor would soon be coming back, bearing the gift of Wormwood.