Wormwood (41 page)

Shane shook his head as if he couldn’t accept this.  His trip
couldn’t
have been for nothing.

“She wanted me to give you something,” Rudy remembered, reaching into his back pocket, his trembling hand coming out with a folded envelope, the gummed flap still sealed.  He gave it to Shane with an air of relief, as if a great responsibility had been taken from his shoulders.  Shane unfolded it, finding his name in his mother’s handwriting looped across the creases.  As Rudy finished what little there was left to tell, Shane tore it open.

“After she handed that to me, she went back inside to sit with your father.  About an hour later, after dark, the two of them came outside… I saw them in the moonlight.  They were… they were
both
infected.”

“Oh Shane,” Marie said, her voice heavy with sympathy as she reached out to touch him.

Tears spattered across the face of the note.

Dear, dear son,
it began.

10

The two of them lay together on Marie’s narrow bed, the heat from their lovemaking cooling now, soaking into the creaking timbers of the house.

“Shane?” Marie whispered, wondering if he’d fallen asleep, his head heavy on her breast.

Sluggishly he stirred.  “Hmm.”

The candle on the nightstand stuttered, the blackened wick hissing in a pool of wax.

“When you leave tomorrow, will you take me with you?”

He opened his eyes and lifted his head, surprised.  “What about your dad?”

A pained expression passed over her face, like the shadow of a bird, one that she made an effort to shoo away, though it left a tear trailing down her cheek.  “I think…” — she wiped the tear away — “I think that if he
could
have come back, he would have been here by now.  I think…” — again she stumbled, clearly having trouble declaring him dead — “that if he couldn’t make it back, he would have wanted me to find someone like you.”

She broke down crying and Shane took her in his arms, letting the poison and the tremors pass through him and out toward the shadow-laden corners of the room, like ripples in a summer pond.  And when she had quieted enough to hear him, Shane kissed her face and whispered in her ear that of course, of course she could come with him, if that was what she wanted.  He had only been thinking of a way to ask.

She started to cry all over again, only this time her tears weren’t bitter.

They made love again before sleep came — insistent in its calling — and when she hesitantly told him that she wasn’t using birth control, Shane laughed softly in the flickering light.

“That’s all right,” he said, his hand on the warm curve of her thigh.  “The way things are, the idea of birth control seems a little silly, doesn’t it?  Like spitting in the face of God.”

Marie hugged him closer, more confident than ever in her decision

By the time the candle sputtered and drowned, they were asleep in each other’s arms.

11

“What about the fire?” Shane asked, and this seemed to cause Rudy more pain than having to tell him about his parents; a devastating pain that couldn’t be shrugged off with the delivery of a good-bye note.

“I set fire to my own house,” Rudy admitted and these words cut his insides like a tangle of thorns that he could neither pass nor digest.

“Why?”
Shane asked, his voice quiet but insistent, causing Rudy’s face to crumple in on itself like a useless wad of paper.  He made a choked sound and two long tears crept out of the creases beneath his glasses.

“Because I’m a
coward
!” Rudy cried, the thick green venom, the bitter self-hatred bubbling out of him freely now.  “Because I was too weak to shoot my own family!”

Shane took an unconscious step back as if Rudy might explode, splattering everything in the stairwell with a powerful corrosive.

“Aimee and I were sleeping because I’d been up most of the night… and a man, a man came to the door in a Federal Express uniform.  One of the kids… either John or Denise must have let him in because he, he… he killed them both before Aimee and I even knew he was in the house!”

Shane shook his head, a prophetic chill creeping slowly up the back of his neck.  Filed neatly away in his memory, he saw a white Fed-Ex van overturned in a weedy ditch, the motorbike veering to give it a wide berth, he and Larry having just set out from Quail Street.  The dead driver appeared around the next bend and Shane had put the grisly aberration squarely in his sights… but he hadn’t pulled the trigger.  The man was easily bypassed and they hadn’t brought enough ammunition to shoot indiscriminately.

Now here was the result: a man’s entire family dead.  Shane wanted to clap his hands over his ears, but Rudy kept right on sobbing.

“I, I shot him in the living room… then I took my son and daughter out to the street and shot them both like rabid dogs.  I shot them in the head and, and after all that we couldn’t find Sarah.  We couldn’t find my oldest girl.”

Rudy shook his head wistfully, as if he should have known better, and in that gesture Shane sensed that the worst of the tale was yet to come.  He glanced at Marie and saw tears on her cheeks, her attitude both sympathetic and horrified, as if she couldn’t decide whether to reach out to Rudy or turn and run screaming up the stairs.

“I went looking outside for her, walking from house to house calling her name, deciding she’d run away and taken shelter somewhere else, somewhere nearby… but she hadn’t.”  Rudy looked up in agitation, struggling with his composure, and now Marie did reach out and touch his arm.  The gesture seemed to steady him, to lend him the strength he needed to get through the rest of it.  “She’d seen it all,” he went on, tears flowing down his cheeks.  “She saw what I’d done to her brother and sister and decided she didn’t want to live anymore.  She, she went upstairs to her closet and pushed herself deep inside, back behind all her outgrown dresses.  She’d taken… she taken my pocket knife from on top of the dresser and she cut her wrists with it.  She cut her own wrists and then bled to death in the back of her closet.”

Rudy took a long, shuddering breath, as if resigned now to his fate.  “When I came back to the house Aimee had found her, or Sarah had found her mother… in the end I suppose there’s no real difference.  They were both dead, infected… but after John and Denise, I couldn’t bring myself to shoot them.  I lured them into the garage instead and locked them inside.”

Rudy shook his head as if lost.  “After that, I wandered around the house, listening to them scratch and moan at the door.  I don’t know for how long… long enough for me to find the bloody footprints leading out of Sarah’s closet and the pocket knife lying inside, the blade folded neatly back inside its casing, which would have been just like her.  I, I thought about using it on my own wrists, but that wouldn’t have solved anything… and I still had unfinished business waiting in the garage.”  He looked at Shane and then Marie, his eyes imploring.  “I couldn’t just leave them like that!”

“No,” Shane agreed, his voice a rough whisper.

“But I couldn’t bring myself to shoot them either, so I started thinking… and what finally occurred to me was the gas container we used to fill the tank of the motorcycle.”

Shane nodded, recalling the bright red can.

“I filled it up, siphoning gasoline out of the fuel tank of my car, and set fire to the house,” Rudy concluded.  “I set fire to my wife and daughter and then I hid here like a coward, not caring if the house burned down around me or not.”

12

“What if they’re dead?” Marie asked, her voice treading softly in the early morning light.  She looked at Shane openly, having just put her own father to rest.  “Have you thought about the possibility?”

Shane nodded.  “I’ve thought about it, but it hasn’t been that long.  Only two days.  It takes longer than two days to die of an infection.”

Marie let it go at that, but she wondered.  Despite all he’d been through, Shane’s thinking on some subjects was still stuck in the past: a time when you could pick up the phone and summon an ambulance; a place where hospitals and emergency rooms still existed.

Here, now…
bitten by something as aggressive as Wormwood, she suspected two days was plenty of time to find death.

They touched upon the subject once more before setting out on the motorcycle, Marie asking him if she should bother locking up the farmhouse.

“Go ahead,” he told her.  “You never know.  We might find ourselves right back here come sundown.”

She hesitated then asked him again.  “What if they
are
dead, Shane?  What then?  Where would we go?  Aside from coming back here, that is.”

He smiled at her, pleased by the plurality of the word “we”, and gave a slight nod.  Larry and I talked about that a little,” he admitted.  “Nothing specific, but it seemed sensible to start moving south, somewhere where the winters aren’t so cold.”  He gazed contemplatively toward the south, as if imagining a quiet paradise beyond the stubbled ridges.  White sands, palm trees, and the gentle lapping of the surf.  “I’ve heard that the beaches are nice in Mexico,” he said, turning back, running his fingers over the padded seat, wondering how far the motorcycle would take them.

She clapped her hands and laughed. 
“Mexico!”

Shane looked at her and shrugged, embarrassed, then he grinned.

Marie leaned over the bike and as she kissed him, she pictured the two of them living in a thatched hut or bungalow, on a long and emerald stretch of sea.

They might never make it there, but it was enough.

Just the dream was enough.

13

“What’s it like out there?” Rudy asked, his eyes turning to the soft light falling down the stairs, though his feet were unwilling to step from the shelter.

Shane and Marie exchanged a guarded look, then Shane shook his head.

“As bad as we thought?” Rudy wondered.

Recalling Summertides, the scorched town of Brace, the exodus of empty cars on the freeway and the bodies floating on the river, Shane nodded.  “
Worse
in places.”

Rudy sighed, retreated a step into the shelter then seemed to notice the conspicuous absence of the home’s owner.  He studied Shane’s face for a long moment then asked about Larry.

Shane took a deep breath.  “He made it as far as Fred Meyer, and then lost a good piece of his arm coming out of the pharmacy.”  His voice dropped to a murmur.  “I left him in the manager’s office with a loaded gun.  He said he didn’t want to come back to this house.”

Rudy nodded.  “I suspected as much when he brought me down here to show me his wife and son.”  He raised an inquiring eyebrow then hesitated.  “Was he of much help to you?”

“Yes.”  Shane’s head was downcast.  “I wouldn’t have made it without him.”

Something like a smile touched Rudy’s face.  “I’m glad for him then.  I’m glad he found a way out of his bitterness.”  The smile slipped slowly away, as if he hadn’t the same high hopes for himself and, reminded of this fact, glanced uneasily toward the shelter’s far corner.  The one Larry had pointed out to him.  The thing was gone now, but he had no doubt it would be back, crouched atop the boxes, watching him… waiting patiently for the inevitable.