Pam Dawley went to the linen closet and came back with a thick blanket, which she spread out on the kitchen floor for Bud. Naomi Sturling pulled back the dining table and her husband crouched down with Mike and Rudy to move Bud into the receiving arms of the blanket.
They carried him home and, after they left, Helen washed him and dressed him in his best gray suit.
Later, as she was sewing a fresh sheet around him for a shroud, the electricity went off in the cul-de-sac for good. The reading lamp in the corner winked out but she hardly noticed. Later still, as twilight fell, she lit candles around him to keep her vigil.
Shortly after eight o’clock, a knock sounded on her front door: light and apologetic, embarrassed by the intrusion. Helen rose from the bed, smoothed the wrinkles out of her dress, and went to let them in.
Rudy and Shane had dug a grave for Bud in the garden and, with the moon looking down over their shoulders, they buried him there.
All of Quail Street.
17
Tad Kemper and his three companions didn’t fare so well.
It had been Mike’s intention to bury them across the creek or below the bridge, somewhere out of sight and mind. He was mulling over the various possibilities when Keith came in from the back yard to help him carry Tad (yes, they’d gone through their wallets, putting a name — and in Tad’s case, a face — to each of the bodies) out to join the others. They were stacked beneath the shady arch of the bridge, waiting for a grave to be decided upon and a hole dug large enough to receive all four of them.
Mike had spent the better part of the morning in his basement, his wife’s rubber gloves stretched tightly over his hands as he stripped Tad of any useful items in his pockets, then rolled him up in a black plastic tarp. He worked gingerly at first, not wanting to touch anything, disgusted with the congealed splatters of blood and brain, but by the time he had the tarp rolled out, he’d become somewhat accustomed to Tad and even found the stomach to marvel at Helen’s handiwork. With two rounds she’d managed to rob him of any intellect or identity he might have possessed. Portions of his lower jaw were still intact, but everything above that was broken into pieces and open to interpretation. It was a lesson in ballistics and anatomy that Mike was unlikely to forget.
“What do you want to do with them?” Keith asked, his hands in his pockets, eyes regarding the black, bungee-wrapped parcel against the wall.
“I guess dig a hole anywhere that’s easy and out of sight,” Mike sighed, peeling off his yellow gloves and looking at his hands in distaste. They were pruned and clammy, fishbelly white. “Some spot where we won’t hit a lot of rocks or tree roots.”
Keith nodded as if he’d decided that much himself, but looked like he had something more to suggest.
Mike narrowed his eyes. “Did you have something else in mind?”
“Actually, I do,” Keith admitted, “but I don’t know how you’ll take it, much less the rest of the block.”
Mike smiled thinly, wondering if the day could hold any more shocks or surprises. “I guess we won’t know until you tell me.”
Keith hesitated. “It’s sort of barbaric; medieval, you might say… but it might keep this sort of thing from happening again.”
“Well I’m all for that,” Mike said. “Let’s hear it.”
Keith told him his idea and watched as Mike’s expression shifted; not as badly as he’d feared, but enough to know that he’d been right: it was barbaric. Yet at the same time it held a certain persuasion, a logic seldom seen outside times of war or anarchy; but then, hadn’t they fallen on such times?
The black bundle against the wall seemed to indicate that they had. That it wasn’t necessarily a new world they were facing, but a very old one.
Mike nodded, acknowledging the merits of the idea. “I can tell you right now the women aren’t going to like it. They’d just as soon forget these bastards.”
Both men, however, found their wives unexpectedly easy to sway. Barbaric or not, they had no desire to repeat the experience. They expressed some initial concerns for the younger children, but Rudy laid these aside, reminding them that his son and daughters had been trapped in the Dawley’s basement as well. The experience had already marked them, and this idea that Mike and Keith were proposing might give them a sense of justice, or closure, or simply a reason to hope it wouldn’t happen again.
“If these four men are the worst we have to face in the coming days, I’ll be extremely grateful,” Rudy concluded. “So if there are no other objections, I think we should go ahead.”
There were objections, of course; most of them from Larry and Jan, who had two young sons of their own; but since no one had seen Mark or Brian Hanna set foot out of the house in the last few days (and since Larry himself had been of little to no help during the recent crisis), these were overruled or outright ignored.
And since they were still living in a democracy, at least to the border of Kennedy Street, Keith’s proposal was carried.
Helen lent Rudy the keys to Bud’s old pickup and the men of Quail Street (including Shane but minus Larry, who had left the meeting in a huff) drove through the Sturling’s yard to the creek and brought back the four corpses.
The women (minus Jan, who’d followed in her husband’s footsteps) remained at the Cheng’s to make placards out of posterboard left over from Sarah’s 7th grade science project and an assortment of waterproof markers.
18
“TRESPASSER” proclaimed the first, rendered in large black letters and slung around the man’s neck.
“THIEF” shouted another, this one in dark blue and worn by the man Rudy had shot with Larry’s rifle.
“TRANSGRESSOR” accused a third in green. There had been some debate about this appellation, as it sounded archaic, almost biblical to the modern ear.
“Good,” Rudy nodded, pleased with the connection. “Perhaps they’ll think back on their Sunday School lessons.”
The worst of the placards was saved for Tad Kemper. “MURDERER” it screamed in dripping red blocks, and since he had little in the way of a head to hang it from, they pinned it to his chest.
Bret Chastain, the trespasser, was bound with clothesline and thrown over the side of the Kennedy Street bridge, where he dangled and spun in the hollow of the arch like a feast for a giant spider.
Greg Mashburn, the thief Shane had shot from his rooftop vantage, hung on a bright orange extension cord from the arm of the streetlamp at the intersection of Kennedy and Quail.
Stan Lizotte, the fabled transgressor, was spread by the arms, Christlike, between two power lines directly over Kennedy Street.
And Tad Kemper, murderer, was tied to the crotch of an apple tree in the Navarro’s side yard, his ruined face grinning up through the blossoms at the sky, arms thrown back as if he’d been cast out of Heaven.
They grew more terrible to behold with each passing day, but they worked. They were the last outsiders to venture up Quail Street.
Not that it mattered much in the end.
Six days later, with the coming of Wormwood, the street found a way of spawning its own nightmares.
It started at the Navaro’s, in the house everyone thought abandoned…