This wasn’t the case for the third option if both Summertides and Brace fell through. If that happened, Larry would have to turn the bike south toward the state highway, which in turn would bring them back toward the city and the Fred Meyer supercenter off Columbia Avenue. Fred Meyer was likely to stock the items they needed, but as large as it was, positioned at the northwest corner of the city, it would naturally attract more people. Worse still, the pharmacy counter lay deep within the store.
Both Larry and Shane agreed that feeling their way about the darkened aisles of a dead and windowless supercenter didn’t hold much appeal. Dead or not, it was apt to be full of surprises, most of them unpleasant.
Nevertheless, it would be a last-ditch effort before turning back to Quail Street or coming up with something on their own. To that effect, Pam reminded them of the clusters of medical buildings further up Columbia. Doctor’s offices and clinics that might be worth considering, to which Rudy shook his head and put forth the opinion it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Larry concluded the discussion, stating simply that he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
12
The first dead man came stumbling at them along Kennedy.
They’d covered less than a quarter mile, seeing nothing more unusual than a Fed-Ex van turned on its side in the grassy ditch. There was a bloody handprint smeared against the bright white panel of the door, a cracked cataract where the windshield had been, but these were in no way conclusive. There was no body so they continued on after a cursory glance, only to encounter a man with a matching Fed-Ex patch on his grass-stained blouse around the next bend. He was peering into a battered mailbox.
Larry slowed the bike to a walk and the man turned, close enough to read the name stitched above his left breast pocket.
Leo
. Leo had an ugly gash on his forehead and an angry slash down the side of his face. Neither of them looked particularly deep, but there was no mistaking the fever of Wormwood in his eyes.
Shane glanced into the mailbox in passing and saw something that looked dark and sticky.
A piece of liver or kidney,
his mind whispered; something pulled from a torn abdominal cavity. No telling what Leo was trying to do; mail it, perhaps. It was impossible to say.
Shane felt a strong urge to use his father’s 9mm on the man; snuff him out of existence like a spider poised in the bathroom sink; but the fact was they were likely to come across a great many such victims on the road ahead and their ammunition was extremely limited, so he held on to Larry and let Leo slip away.
It was a decision he’d later come to regret.
13
Half a mile past Hudson Pond, at the crest of the ridge, there was a wide gravel turnabout off the shoulder of the road where drivers could pull off and enjoy a panoramic view of the city. It was a popular place for teenagers to come and park, isolated enough to drink beer and grope one another while the city lights sparkled below.
Larry and Shane found a car parked there as they approached, its front bumper right up to the battered and graffiti-covered guardrail. An old Impala with a torn vinyl roof and a lone silhouette propped up behind the wheel. Larry nosed the Yamaha in well away from it and let the engine sputter to a halt.
The wind rose to fill the silence. A hazy, yellow-colored wind.
Shane eased himself off the back of the bike and Larry swung his leg over, both of them assessing the shape in the Impala before stepping to the guardrail and turning their attention to the city.
“Would you look at
that
,” Larry whispered, awed by the sight, to which Shane could only shake his head.
The city lay in a wide valley and spread itself out to them like a corpse on an examination table. Whole sections of it were frantically burning, the flames visible to the naked eye even from four or five miles away. Other areas, now stunted and withered, seemed content to smolder, an eerie mist lying over the streets in an unsettling veil. The hand of God descending, only this time it wouldn’t be placated with a splash of lamb’s blood on the door, no more than it would be content with the first-born son. Wormwood, they could see, played no favorites. It simply opened its jaws and devoured
everything
. No one was safe because no one had built up an immunity to death.
Still, there were large portions of the city that looked untouched by the disease, though this was likely not the case, no more than Quail Street had escaped it. They were simply host to quieter horrors, those content to remain indoors and out of sight. The kind that Larry had left behind in his basement.
All it took was one dead body. A single viable corpse to take root…
And here were the results, spread out before them.
Twenty-four hours and the city was in ruins.
Only God, Larry decided, could work that quickly, and God had turned out to be something of a disappointment; a downright bastard, erasing people and cities like lines from a blackboard. Equations that didn’t balance.
He and Shane gazed at God’s handiwork until they couldn’t take it any longer, until each blink of the eye brought some new atrocity into focus: a church in flames, a shopping center collapsed upon itself, a park or schoolyard strewn with bodies.
And beneath it all, the sound of screams… the steady
tat-tat-tat
of small arms fire…
Carried up to them on the wings of the wind.
14
The man in the Impala had no face, just a ragged scream blasted into his skull large enough to thread an arm through. A shotgun lay stiffly against the steering wheel, both barrels fired and then fallen into a reverent silence.
Shane wondered if he’d ever get used to such sights, or if they’d cling to him like ghosts, haunting him until he sought the same unbearable release.
There was a note pinned to the man’s chest, folded neatly and addressed:
To Whom It May Concern
.
Larry knew what it would say the moment he saw it.
Dear Concerned,
I can’t live with myself. I shot my wife and two sons, and even though they had the disease and it was the right thing to do, I can’t get the images out of my head. I see their faces and I hear the sound of the rifle and I know there’s nothing left for me…
He’d written that much himself, scribbled it on the back of a canned food label while a grinning thing watched from its perch in the corner. He’d coughed up those awful, despairing words and then he’d burned them, ashamed, unable to take that final step, to even suggest it on paper.
Yet the idea had never left his mind, and part of him wondered if he’d gone ahead with this trip on the chance he’d never return. The same part of him that still believed that suicide was God’s one unpardonable sin.
He looked at the man in the Impala. At the devastating hole where his face had been.
In the end, what could a simple note say?
That he was in torment, in pain?
They could see that well enough themselves.
Shane reached in and unpinned the sheet from the man’s bloody shirt. As he started to unfold it, Larry snatched it from him, unable to take on the man’s burden. He refolded it and stuffed it into his back pocket, unread.
Shane looked at him, puzzled.
Larry shook his head. “It doesn’t concern us,” he said, turning back to the bike.
15
The north side of the ridge dropped quickly down a canyon and spit them out at a stalled collision. A twisted meeting of pickup, car and trailer which had appeared around a blind corner and sent them skidding toward the ditch.
Shane felt the bike begin to shimmy through a spill of broken glass, the engine protesting as Larry downshifted and they sputtered past the chrome hook of a partially detached bumper, the Yamaha finally arriving at a tentative stop on the graveled shoulder.
“Are you all right?” Larry called back, letting the motor drop to a steady idle.
“All right,” Shane agreed, though in truth it had been a very near thing. He felt lightheaded and sick, his arms and legs trembling while his heart beat thunderously against his eardrums.
Wreckage was sprawled across the roadway, the pickup and trailer jackknifed and flipped over with the hood of the Cadillac folded deep inside, as if the long luxury car had come sailing down the canyon and around the corner just as the pickup had been struggling onto the roadway. Bits of plastic, lumps of glass and crumpled metal had been thrown about like weightless confetti. There were dented cans of food, burst batteries, scatters of loose bullets… none of which had done them much good in the end. Articles of clothing and personal items had been thrown all over the shoulder and into the bordering field like leftovers from a garage sale.
Larry and Shane more or less paddled the motorcycle through the debris, touching a foot down here and a foot down there until they were clear of the worst of it. Larry spotted something of interest along the far shoulder and brought the bike to a halt, pointing it out to Shane.
“What is it?” he asked, uncertain. “Some sort of explosive?”
“No, road flares,” Larry told him, adding they might come in handy if they ended up in a cave like Fred Meyer. “Why don’t you grab them?” he suggested. “I’ll move the bike forward a bit in case someone comes barreling down that hill.”
“All right,” Shane agreed, pushing himself off the back of the seat.
“If you hear a car coming, get yourself clear of that wreck,” Larry warned, angling the Yamaha toward the south shoulder, giving it a little gas. When he had it a safe distance from the crash, he turned and saw Shane crouched down on the pavement, gathering up flares.
Something seemed to distract Shane and he paused, his head angled toward the heart of the collision. Hurriedly, he picked up the last few flares then trotted quickly back to Larry and the bike, his face a pale grimace.
“What’s the matter?” Larry asked, concerned.
Shane cocked his head toward the twisted steel.
“There are still things moving around in there
16
Summertides was only another mile or so ahead, but it was a dangerous mile, with the passing houses gathering closer to one another, marching increasingly toward the road. Shane and Larry saw bodies wandering like sunstricken hoboes along the shoulders of the road, across the road itself, and deep inside the open pastures.
Along one of the last stretches of undeveloped land, they came across a small herd of cattle that lay in bloodied lumps, as if the animals had wandered inadvertently into a minefield. There were people too — Wormwood casualties — crawling amongst the torn remains, feeding off the raw lumps of flesh. They began to take notice of the passing motorcycle and Larry opened the throttle a little more. There was no speedometer, but to Shane it felt like thirty five or forty. Fast enough to break bones or scrape off skin if something got in front of them.
Fortunately, nothing did.
17
Summertides, however, was a different story; its fate not at all as Shane or Larry had imagined.