Helen Iverson was standing at the far end of the patio, as white as a ghost, her expression conveying the dawning horror of one who thinks she’s buried her husband alive.
A strangulated moan rose from Bud and, forgetting the pistol he’d given her to protect herself, she ran to him.
13
The basement door standing open behind him, Larry moved out across the lawn like an astronaut leaving the safety of his capsule to take his first walk across the hostile vacuum of outer space. His eyes tried to see everywhere at once, giving him a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if the Earth were turning behind his back, throwing up the undigested remains of its dead.
“Mark?” he called warily, as if afraid of being overheard. “Brian?”
He heard a rustling in the lazy mass of junipers along the back fence and froze, his gun coming around and leveling in that direction. His eldest son crawled out into the faded sunlight, his shirt torn and his eyes fifty years older. His hair was full of dead needles.
“Mark?” Larry whispered, uncertain, his rifle still pointed at the boy. He felt a twitch jump through his trigger finger as the boy broke cover and bolted past like a rabbit, swallowed up by the basement door. Larry just had time to register an angry crisscross of cuts and scratches on his son’s back and arms before the door swung shut with a loud bang.
“Mark?” Larry called, the barrel of the gun drooping as he was confronted with the mute face of his own house, the door shut and the windows boarded over.
“Mark, where’s your brother?” he shouted, the sound of his voice bouncing off the siding. He realized that he was floating alone in open space, the hatch of his capsule screwed shut. There was a single bullet in the breach of his rifle and nothing to replace it with on this side of the door.
He turned back to the junipers, reasoning if one son had been hiding there the other must be as well. He managed seven or eight paces from the house when another noise, less furtive, caught his ear. He turned toward it, looking north up the rising hillside, and saw something that made his breath stop. Brian was laid out on his back at the edge of the lawn, not moving, and another boy was down on his hands and knees, leaning over him.
Giving him CPR, Larry thought at first. CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
His heart lurched, sending him stumbling over a seamless boundary that separated his life from that of his five-year-old son. He sprinted across the yard and was almost upon them before he realized, before he really saw what was happening.
It wasn’t mouth-to-mouth the kid was performing, it wasn’t CPR…
He was tearing out the bottom of Brian’s jaw with his teeth, devouring the soft flesh of his unprotected neck as if it were a particularly savory piece of chicken.
“Shit,” he heard someone swear, worlds away, and then a haggard scream raked down his spine.
Four-year-old Zack Navaro, who in life had often played trucks or soldiers with Brian in the back yard, looked up from the bloody tatters of his friend’s throat, saw Larry standing over him, and made a curdling noise like an old tomcat protecting a plump gray sparrow.
Larry saw the light of Wormwood in Zack’s eyes: a faint glow like a raging fever inside an otherwise empty skull. It gazed back at him, utterly alien, and he swung the heavy barrel of his rifle around, bringing it to bear inches from the boy’s face. Blood and flecks of pulpy gore were smeared across Zack’s chin, painting his teeth and dripping in long streaks down his neck, and Larry realized that this had all been stolen from him. That because of this his son would die and there was no good or God to be found in it, no matter how long he stared.
His face twisted. Tears rolled from his eyes and a strangulated sob, as bitter as black vomit, rose from his throat.
He tensed his stomach and pulled the trigger, expecting a sharp report but hearing only a dull snap, like two stones kissing in a dry riverbed. He looked down at the rifle in disappointment; it felt inert in his hands, a shape poured out of cheap metal and made to hang in a den rather than fire live rounds.
Zack Navaro stared up at him. Half a second before he tumbled over, Larry thought one of his eyes had widened, and then he saw the hole shot through the back of his head, bloodless and clean.
He pulled back the bolt and ejected the spent shell, his hands suddenly trembling.
14
Mike Dawley watched Helen run toward her husband’s grave with the slow clarity of a dream, one he’d suffered through a good many times and now knew every movement by heart. It carried with it the inevitable feeling of déjà vu, of circumstances spiraling down to a textbook conclusion.
“Helen!” Rudy cried, his arms turned into shovels, which was a bit like something out of a dream itself. “Don’t!”
The words flashed through Mike’s mind a heartbeat before his neighbor spoke them aloud and he brought up the shotgun according to script, squeezing off a single, hastily-aimed shell before Helen fouled his line of sight. The scattering of pellets caught a piece of Bud, peppering his back and shoulders, but from that distance it might as well have been a clean miss. The only thing that was going to knock Bud back into his grave was a point-blank shot to the head.
Rudy dropped one of his shovels and ran toward the garden, shouting Bud’s name in hope of diverting his attention.
Slipping another cartridge into the shotgun, Mike followed helplessly at his heels. At this point he knew where both shells were going; the uncertainty was whether or not he’d have to break the breach open and load a third for Rudy.
15
Zack Navaro’s small and lifeless body had fallen over Brian’s chest and Larry had to drag him away by the ankles to see the full extent of the damage done to his son.
“Oh Jesus…” Larry swore, closing his eyes and wishing the knowledge away. “Oh, my Christ, no…”
Brian lay on his back at the edge of the lawn, his arms splayed out slightly from his sides, as if in supplication or gentle offering.
Take this, my body, and eat of it.
“No,” Larry winced, falling to his knees, the phrase hammering at him so persistently that he had to clench his fists to get it to fade to a tolerable whisper.
A shotgun fired somewhere in the near distance, sending an involuntary twitch along his spine.
Larry opened his eyes again and looked down at his son.
To his surprise, Brian was gazing back at him.
16
Helen reached her husband well ahead of them, hardly aware of the shot Mike fired from the edge of the patio or what it might have told her.
Bud took her eagerly, hauling her into the grave and tearing at her before she even realized she’d fallen. He bit into her breast as a lover might, searching for the shortest route to her heart.
She tasted her own blood and, as the shock set in, wondered if this might be for the best.
She had her husband back.
And he had her.
17
Two more shotgun blasts: the sounds chasing one another across the hills and folds.
In the silence that came afterward, Larry Hanna got to his feet, his eyes fixed on his son. Unlike Helen Iverson, Larry had no illusions or misconceptions about what he was seeing, no fatherly urge to gather Brian into his arms and cry out his thanks to God’s mercy.