Mike nodded. “I’ll be careful,” he promised.
22
He met up with Rudy at the curb and the two of them followed the blood trail into the house. There was a surprising amount to follow, especially once they left the lawn. Inside the Sturling’s living room, they found themselves standing on an oatmeal-colored carpet, its knap thick and luxurious, with flecks of blue and brown sprinkled in to help hide the dirt and give it texture. The loss of blood was nothing less than shocking against it, as if it had come off a roller, deep red and on clearance all day. The smell alone was overwhelming.
The two men glanced uneasily at one another, knowing the only thing they’d find at the end of such a trail would be a corpse, which of course might or might not still be there.
Without a word, they checked their guns before proceeding.
Beneath the blood the house smelled stale, like a cardboard box left out in the sun. It was dark, boarded up. A faint fan of light fell against the kitchen floor, but the blood didn’t go anywhere near it; instead it veered down the hall, toward a bedroom or the bath, through nothing but gloom.
“Keith?” Mike’s shotgun swung over the back of the sofa. “Naomi?”
They listened but nothing moved, no one answered, though the dark itself seemed to grin back at them.
Rudy found himself wishing he’d brought a pistol, something that was easier to wield within the close confines of a house. Pistols, however, were in short supply and he’d left one of the ones they’d taken at 7-Eleven with Aimee. Another thing they forgotten was a flashlight. Over at the Navaro’s they hadn’t needed one because there was only a thin gauze of curtain over the windows, not ¾-inch plywood. The Navaros had bowed out of the game before the reinforcements had gone up. Here though, at the Sturling’s, there was only a small peninsula of light with a sea of darkness pressing around them. Another step and they’d be wading in it; two more and they’d be drowning.
Fortunately, a solution presented itself. Since the power had gone out, most everyone had taken to keeping flashlights or candles within easy reach, and the Sturling’s were no exception. There was a small penlight just inside the door, on a table that had once collected bills and car keys and sunglasses. It lay there like an unspoken invitation.
Come on in.
Mike picked it up and juggled his shotgun to get it working. A thin yellow beam appeared, ending on the ceiling as a fluid ellipse. He pointed it down the hall. The blood scraped the wall then hooked into a darkened doorway.
“Keith?” Mike shouted. “Naomi?”
The grin widened.
“Hello?”
“I don’t like this,” Mike said unhappily, his voice directed at Rudy now, as if his neighbor could somehow absolve him. Wave his hand and pronounce him free from any further responsibility. “He should have answered.”
Rudy agreed. They stood fast on their lighted peninsula, escape just a step away.
“Any plans or suggestions?” Mike wondered.
Rudy admitted that nothing came to mind, except the most obvious: follow the blood.
Mike frowned. “I was afraid of that.” He studied the darkened hall and sighed. “I told Pam I’d be careful.”
“Oh yes,” Rudy agreed. “Most definitely.”
The two of them inched forward, guns out.
Trying not to step on the trail.
23
The first bedroom they came to was a spare, a desk firmly anchored in the far corner. It had likely started out as an office or den and then simply became a receptacle for everything the Sturlings couldn’t bring themselves to throw away. A treadmill buried under a fall of winter clothes, a bookcase loaded with old videotapes and computer programs. A sewing machine surrounded by shoeboxes and magazines.
A thin layer of dust lay over the hard surfaces, as if the room had already been abandoned or was in the process of becoming a museum display, a place tourists would visit but find too dull to photograph. The flashlight swept the corners and poked about underneath the desk, but quickly decided there was little else to see. The room was unoccupied.
The blood led as far as the next doorway, then became a sticky pool on the bathroom floor, which Mike entered hesitantly in his bare feet. Here they found Naomi, jammed limply in a corner by the tub with her eyes staring up at them, as if the last thing she’d seen had been standing just where they were. Her pretty blonde hair was in bloody tangles.
A step or two further and they saw the bullethole, then the dark splash of brain matter sticking to the wall behind her.
“Shit, she’s dead,” Mike whispered, his voice a sharp hiss as the flashlight veered away, looking for Keith now.
“Wait a minute,” Rudy said, pointing toward the sink. “What’s that?”
Mike turned and bounced the light off the mirror, illuminating a towel bar on the opposite wall whose neat arrangement stood in gross counterpoint to the blood and chaos that had chewed up the rest of the room. Mike gazed at its reflection with a mixture of longing and fascination, as if the overlay of washcloths on towels were already a lost art. A fossilized piece of the past deemed useless and hastily buried while they were busy shooting their neighbors.
“A little higher,” Rudy nudged and Mike raised the beam another foot, wondering what else would become quietly obsolete in the devastating wake of Wormwood.
He saw what Rudy was looking at and frowned. “What is that, a bullet hole?”
A second splash of blood on the mirror — like an isolated island, well away from Naomi, — and a sharp chip along the beveled edge, punctuated by a black period. It seemed to speak for itself. When Mike focused the flashlight on the stain, the room took on a pinkish tinge. He glanced down at Naomi, certain her eyes had shifted with the light, and looked back at the mirror.
Rudy’s reflection looked deeply worried.
“What are you thinking?” Mike asked, afraid he already knew the answer. The blood on the floor was beginning to creep him out. He was afraid to move for fear he’d step in it.
Rudy’s eyes met his in the mirror. “I’m thinking that it would be difficult for a man to miss his target in a room like this, especially a trained soldier.”
“You’re afraid he tried to kill himself,” Mike said numbly, his heart thumping sickly in his chest.
Rudy nodded. “I’m afraid he may have succeeded.”
“If he shot himself, where’s the body?”
Rudy hesitated. “He may not have been as successful as he would have liked.”
Mike uttered a bleak, harsh-sounding laugh and glanced down at Naomi, thinking now there was a success story. He had to bite his lip to keep from falling into the insanity of it. Pretty soon they’d be tallying up the dead in strikes and spares, just like in bowling.
He turned the flashlight at the door, no longer interested in the bathroom but what may have staggered out into the dark. “I think we ought to rethink this,” he said, the shotgun trembling behind the beam, ready to blast anything that appeared in the doorway. “Go back outside and pry some of these boards off the windows.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Rudy agreed, though neither of them moved. Since stepping into the bathroom, a fearful paralysis had settled over them, stiffening their joints and making it difficult to leave. The small room, awful as it was, was safe so long as they had their guns. There was only the one door to defend, whereas if they stepped back into the hall they’d be vulnerable again.