A high scream tore his attention away. He turned toward the house and saw his wife framed in the doorway, her mouth a perfect “O”. Mike Dawley was running down the street with a shotgun cradled in his arms while Helen Iverson stood on her front doorstep, one hand clutching her throat, as motionless as a statue.
“Sweet Jesus,” Mike swore as he arrived at Keith’s side, fumbling with the safety on the shotgun. He looked up at Mashburn’s ruined face and all the color drained from him, just like that, as if the shock of seeing the man thrashing about overhead was one nightmare too many. He lifted the barrel of the gun, swallowed something that went down with difficulty, and fired.
Mashburn jerked, the placard around his neck flew up in the air, then both dropped back against their tethers. Spatters of something that looked like rust (but smelled infinitely worse) began to rain down, followed by a gentler mist, and Keith suggested they take a cautious step back.
The sound of the shotgun brought the rest of Quail Street out to their doorsteps and driveways. Rudy Cheng was hurrying toward them with his rifle, his wife Aimee still in her robe, holding back their young son.
Mike reloaded the shotgun and pointed it up at the still-struggling Mashburn.
“Aim for its head!” Keith advised, taking several steps back, his ears already ringing.
The shotgun sang its one-note song and Mashburn clicked his heels at the end of his cord.
“Its head!” Keith shouted, to which Mike testily replied he had aimed at its head, but the thing’s legs and body kept getting in the way. “We need a rifle,” he said, plucking out the spent and smoking shell.
Rudy ground to a halt, huffing and puffing, holding his brand-new rifle. He looked up at the thief through the round rims of his glasses as if he’d long suspected such a thing could happen. It was not a confirmation that brought him any joy, but he accepted it for what it was: a truth.
Keith turned to him and pointed up. “Can you hit its head with that rifle?”
Rudy swallowed, his expression uncertain. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I haven’t had much practice.” He started to hand the rifle to Keith, but Keith shook his head.
“These are all tied up; chances are the next ones won’t be. They’re likely gonna be running down the street and pounding at your door. I can’t think of a better time to practice than right now.”
Rudy nodded, accepting this simple truth as well. He glanced back at his home, wishing Aimee would take his son back inside. This was not something he needed to witness: his father shooting at another man’s head. Still, this was what the world had become and there was nothing he could do about it.
“Find yourself a good angle,” Keith advised, “and get a bead on its head.”
The thing above them thrashed and snarled as if their intentions had been overheard.
“After you plug this one,” Keith went on, nodding toward Kennedy, “There are three more for you to practice on.”
2
As it turned out there were only two.
Helen Iverson had done a thorough enough job on Tad Kemper the first time that he was spared the dubious honor of coming back. Instead, he sat in the crotch of the Navaro’s apple tree and grinned at the sky as if God were playing a supreme joke on them all and he was the only one on the block in a position to really enjoy it.
One by one Rudy and the others shot the rest of them dead. Again.
Greg Mashburn took a bullet in the neck and two in the chest before Rudy finally found his mark. Each shot just seemed to make it angrier and angrier until the side of its skull blew out in a rusty plume and it stopped being angry for good.
Once this tactic appeared tried and true, the men attempted to get their wives to come out and practice their marksmanship on the other two, but all they got in return were looks of horror and disgust, as if it had been suggested they come out and have sex with some perfectly nice looking strangers.
“You’re going to have to get used to this,” Keith warned, shaking his head at Naomi, but she didn’t see it that way, at least not yet.
The same was true for Aimee and Pam, and Larry wasn’t even answering his door.
“So much for the bomb shelter,” Mike grumbled, gazing up at the Hanna’s living room window, watching the sly part in the curtains fall back into place.
“It’s still early,” Rudy asserted. “I wouldn’t count them out just yet.”
Mike sighed and turned away, shaking his head.
“Ask Bud Iverson how early he thinks it is.”
3
As the morning wore into afternoon, Rudy found himself thinking a good deal about Bud. He found himself wondering if they’d buried him deep enough.
Before the power failure effectively cut them off from the rest of the world, there had been several theories circulating on television and internet blogs concerning the origins and epidemiology of the phenomenon that had come to be known as Wormwood.
Initially, the thinking had been that it was spread like any other virus or contagion: by source to source contact, be it blood-borne or (more likely, due to the rapidity with which it spread) airborne. But there was a problem with this theory, Rudy realized, and the problem had to do with the three cases he and his neighbors had just shot dead. Not a one of which was breathing or exchanging potentially infectious materials at the time of the outbreak (unless, of course, the crows could be said to be carriers, which Rudy summarily dismissed because it didn’t fit the number of national cases).
A second theory he’d read of took a step into darker territory and held that the people killed or wounded by established cases took on the disease themselves, though they didn’t exhibit symptoms or become carriers themselves until after death. Yet again, at least on Quail Street, this theory didn’t hold true. Kemper and his buddies had been killed by bullets, not other carriers, and it had taken them almost a week to come back. From what Rudy had been seeing in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, areas of mass epidemic, the change took place in a matter of minutes, sometimes before emergency crews and family members could get the bodies out to the street to burn them.
A third theory, which had been gaining support when the electricity went dead, held that Wormwood wasn’t a germ or a virus at all, but a type of fallout or radiation spread throughout the atmosphere by the downed Yellowseed satellite. At first this was laughed off as science fiction or speculation, but the people doing the laughing were the same ones — grant researchers and government officials — who’d put the thing into orbit in the first place.
Proponents of the radiation model pointed to a map with an overlay of the satellite’s path of descent and a black “X” at the impact site, citing the first cases in a rural area of Pennsylvania and plotting the high density of subsequent cases cropping up along the westward arc of the burning satellite. It made a convincing argument, and it also explained why the phenomenon was traveling slowly but steadily westward despite natural barriers and rigid quarantine zones.
One man Rudy had seen on television likened the fallout to a long comet’s tail descending across the United States. While the epidemic appeared to be traveling in a westerly direction, what was actually happening was that the radioactive particles were taking longer to filter through the layers of atmosphere as they trailed back along the satellite’s line of descent. In keeping with that model, the longer the particles remained aloft the more dispersed they became due to factors such as wind currents and the Earth’s rotation. “That,” the man assured his audience, “is exactly what we’re seeing with Yellowseed.” He pointed to a map of North America overlaid with a menacing red fireball on a collision course with Willard, Pennsylvania, its long tail dissolving somewhere high over the waters of the Pacific Ocean. “The more time that passes, the more indistinct the tail of our satellite becomes, and the more widespread the contamination.