Wormwood (39 page)

I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His wrath.

He has led me and made me walk in darkness and not in light.

Surely He has turned His hand against me time and time again throughout the day.

He has aged my flesh and my skin and broken my bones.

He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and woe.

He has set me down in dark places like the dead of long ago.

He has hedged me so I cannot get out; He has made my chain heavy.

Even when I cry and shout, He shuts out my prayer.

He has blocked my ways with hewn stone; He has made my paths crooked.

He has been to me a bear lying in wait, like a lion in ambush.

He has turned aside my ways and torn me in pieces; He has made me desolate.

He has bent His bow and set me up as a target for the arrow.

He has caused the arrows of His quiver to pierce my loins.

Larry closed his eyes and let the arm holding the page drop down to his side.  His eyes were filled with tears and he spoke the last line of the note from memory, as if had been written especially for him.

“
‘He has filled me with bitterness, He has made me drink wormwood.’”

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in darkness.  The last candle had guttered out.

“No matter,” he said aloud, folding the note along its well-worn creases.  He tucked half the fold inside his shirt pocket and left the other half out, like a badge.  Something that God and the world could see.

Given a thousand years, he would never come up with anything better.

Postscript:

Quail Street

1

Quail Street had changed while he was away.

It had taken Shane an extra day to get home, but now it seemed that the effort had been for nothing.  The west side of the street (including his own home) lay in smoldering ruins, the timbers hissing and steaming in the light rain like old dragon bones.

He let the engine die and found himself unable to get off the motorcycle; unable or unwilling.

He thought he had prepared himself for this.

There
was
no way to prepare oneself for this.  For the complete severance and destruction of one’s past; the thoughtless wiping away of everything that had kept him alive for the past two days.  It broke something inside of him and, as the rain continued to fall, he found himself trembling, unable to stop.

“Oh Shane,” a voice whispered, straddling the seat behind him.  “I’m so sorry.”

He let go of the bike and reached back, the street in blurs.  He found a hand there to hold on to, to lend him strength and support.

He wondered how long before that, too, was stripped away.

2

Alone and short on ammunition, Shane had been forced to play things differently than he and Larry had the day before.  When a problem arose — such as the black-clad gang camped alongside the bridge or the spreading kaleidoscope of Summertides — he was forced to wait it out or think of a different way around it, and these things naturally devoured time.

As the warmer, brighter colors began to leach out of the day, leaving shades of blue and gray behind, he turned his eyes to the passing homes and outbuildings, searching for a safe place to spend the night.

Eventually, he settled on one of the farmhouses along the way.

It was impossible to say what made it stand out from all the others he’d passed: that it was well back from the road or perhaps simply the lateness of the hour.  Yet at the same time something about it seemed to call out to him in passing (as if it had been sitting there for years, waiting) and the next thing he knew he’d cut the engine, skidded off the pavement, and was pushing the bike up the narrow lick of driveway; veering not toward the house with its wide porch and inviting steps, but toward the brooding silhouette of the barn.

He was a little disappointed at what he found inside.  There was no loft or comfortable piles of hay to take refuge in, but rather a sleeping tractor and a dull gray collection of heavy implements to drag behind it.  As his eyes grew more accustomed to the gloomy interior, he saw faded bags of chemical fertilizer, a work bench littered with oily pieces of machinery, a pair of paint-spattered sawhorses, and an old fruit bin filled with tortured lengths of applewood… but nothing more inviting to rest his head upon than the cold, hard ground.

Arriving at this unhappy conclusion, Shane started to turn and heard the unmistakable double-click of a shotgun at his back.

That was how he met Marie Barrow.

3

Surveying Quail Street with a critical (almost detached) eye, Shane guessed the fire had started at the Cheng’s, the prevailing winds sweeping down the hill and spreading it south toward Kennedy.  It had devoured everything on the west side of the cul-de-sac while ignoring everything on the east; all except a corner of Larry’s garage, which was withered and blackened but still very much intact.

“Which one was yours?” Marie asked, her hand still in Shane’s as they walked to the smudged remains of the funerary pyre, then came to an uneasy halt.

Shane pointed to a collapsed pile which had fallen gracelessly into its own foundation.  He had no desire to get any closer; at least, not yet.  Other things might become evident in the wreckage upon closer inspection.  Things he wasn’t ready to see.

“I’m sure they made it out,” Marie gently suggested, plucking the image from his mind as if she wished to erase it.  She turned slightly on her heel, taking in the houses behind her, the Iverson’s and the Navaro’s.  She further suggested that they might have taken shelter in one of the remaining homes.

Shane shook his head.  He had grasped at this possibility as well, but now it seemed hollow.  “Where are they?” he asked, releasing her hand and spreading his arms.  He turned a slow circle along the edge of the pyre.  “They would have heard the motorcycle.  They would have come out by now.”

She glanced around the cul-de-sac and sighed, agreeing with a reluctant nod, her damp brown hair shifting on the breeze, her cheeks still flushed from the ride.

“Unless…” Shane murmured, his eyes turning, lit with a bright glimmer of hope.

“Unless
what
?” Marie frowned, but Shane was already moving, running toward the door of the nearest house.  The one with the singed garage.

Confused and alarmed, she ran after him.

4

Marie Barrow had been alone in her house for 15 days.

The first week had been spent waiting for her father to return from her aunt and uncle’s, a round trip of less than eight miles.  At the end of that week, Wormwood had fallen out of the sky like God’s final judgment and Marie had come to the hard realization that her father wasn’t coming back.  That something had happened to him along the way.

In the dark days since that realization, she began to wait for something else.  She didn’t know exactly who or what that something might be, but her father had left his shotgun, along with plenty of ammunition, food, and water to fill the lonely days until she decided.

She had seen the motorcycle and its two riders pass along the road the previous day, without stopping or seeming to take notice of the house at all.  She had watched it from her bedroom window until it was swallowed by a shaggy copse of willows, and then she had watched the willow branches sway until the beelike sound of the engine’s passage had faded to a distant drone.

Good
, she thought, letting the curtain fall back into place, the room resuming its former cast, which was a dusky shade of brown, like an antique photograph.  There would have been no room on the motorbike for an extra rider, and the simple fact that they outnumbered her two-to-one was reason enough to fear them.

But then the following day the bike came back.  It was the same one, she was sure of it, only now one of the riders was gone.  Disappeared just like her father.

The engine sputtered in the pale blue twilight and a dark lump of fear clotted in her chest as she watched the rider dismount and push the bike toward her along the long gray line of the driveway.

Marie left the window long enough to get her father’s shotgun.  She broke it open and checked the breach, making certain both barrels were loaded.

She hesitated, wondering if the stranger would have a gun of his own, then decided it didn’t matter.

One way or another, her long wait would be over.

5

Shane rapped on the door of Larry Hanna’s former house and, when no one answered, tried the door handle.  It was locked, of course, but this in no way discouraged him; on the contrary, he took it as a hopeful sign, a minor obstacle.

By this time Marie was standing beside him.  Her eyes grew wide as he stepped back and put his shoulder to the door, hitting it once… twice… three times before pausing to reconsider his options.  The frame and the deadbolt felt like welded steel, like something he could go on butting until his shoulder turned black.

“Whose house is this?” Marie wondered, squinting up at the second story windows, the light spray of freckles on her nose wrinkling.

“The Hanna’s,” Shane answered, searching around the step for a tool he might use to get past the lock.  “Larry’s,” he added, the word slipping out under his breath.

“The man who went with you to Fred Meyer?”

Shane nodded.  He hit the door twice more and found himself no closer to breaking it down than he had on the first try.  He thought about using his shotgun on the deadbolt and then thought better of it, his eyes settling on one of the plywood-covered windows.

“Why do you want inside?” Marie asked, quietly pointing out the fact that if anyone on Quail Street had survived, they surely would have heard him battering on the door.

“Not if they’re inside the bomb shelter,” he said, moving along the front of the house.  He was too busy testing the grip of the nails on the first sheet of plywood to notice her expression.

“Bomb shelter?”

“Yeah,” Shane nodded, grimacing as the plywood began to creak.  Encouraged, he glanced over at her.

“C’mere and give me a hand with this.”

6