“Do you want me to lead the way?” Rudy volunteered.
Yes, Mike wanted to say. Yes I do. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Rudy had already taken over for him in a moment of weakness in the Navaro’s nursery; he couldn’t very well do that to him again; besides, he didn’t want to give up the penlight.
“No,” Mike replied, forcing himself forward. “I’ll do it.” He stepped carefully over a puddle of blood and paused at the threshold, pointing the beam first left and then right. The house looked as empty as when they’d entered.
Goddamnit Keith, where are you?
Leaving Naomi and the bathroom, they crept past the spare room with its museum stillness and its thin layer of dust. Mike led the way, hugging the clean right wall with his shotgun pointed ahead, hip to hip with Rudy who was covering the dark places behind them. They moved slowly, like a four-legged beast, well-armed and dangerous if surprised.
Which was just what happened — four paces into the living room Keith came gliding out of the woodwork, covered with blood and grim as Death. Mike shrieked, jerked the shotgun at the nightmarish apparition and the thing went off, sending a flickering tongue of flame across the room. Keith (if he’d ever really been there) dropped instantly from sight, like a paper bag swatted from a darkened stage.
In the ringing silence that followed, Mike was not only certain Keith had been there, but that a look of surprise had crossed his face.
Surprise being a human reaction…
Which, if so, might just make him a murderer.
24
Huddled within the concrete walls of the bomb shelter, the Hannas could no longer hear the gunshots echoing off the walls from house to house. Larry had come back down the stairs, set aside his rifle and the spare box of ammunition, and with a bitter look of finality on his face, wrestled the door shut, locking them in.
“Where’s Brian?” Jan asked, only now growing concerned, apparently under the impression that Larry had gone out to rescue him. That, like Mark, he’d been hiding in the juniper bushes when Quail Street began to fall apart. Her concern quickly blossomed into panic when she looked into her husband’s eyes.
“Larry? What did you do with Brian?”
He looked at her flatly and said, “Brian’s dead.”
“Zack ate Brian,” Mark said hollowly, then shuddered against her breast.
The panic receded and a look of confusion took its place. Jan opened her mouth as if to smile, to tell them that it wasn’t a very funny joke, then shut her mouth uncertainly, glancing between Larry and the dark steel panel of the door.
“What do you mean, he’s dead?”
Larry Hanna looked hard at his wife, as if only now realizing that he’d locked himself in with a tiger, one that was just now starting to sharpen her claws. “I mean we lost him,” he told her, trying to keep his voice low and under control. “He came down with Wormwood and I had to put him down.”
Now the smile came out, hideous in the harsh white glow of the battery-powered lantern.
“Larry. Don’t be ridiculous. Open the door and let me see my baby.”
“Jan,” he said softly. “Brian is…” Dead, he meant to tell her, but something in her eyes stopped him: a glimmer far back that warned he’d said enough, that she knew he was dead. Knew it as well as he did, but wouldn’t accept it. It wasn’t stubbornness, it wasn’t a mistake… she’d seen what was on the other side of the basement door and had spent the time he was upstairs erasing it. Sketching something else in Brian’s place. Otherwise, she would have been at the shelter door, opening it herself.
In that moment, Larry understood an unhappy truth: that he could clutch his family close to him, but he couldn’t save them. The fires of Hell and damnation were burning all around them, inside the reinforced shelter as well as Philadelphia or Chicago. He’d been a fool to believe otherwise.
He realized that he didn’t want to die this way.
He didn’t want to die like Brian either, but here, cowering in the ground, it was somehow worse, as if they were already dead. And when he tried to imagine the possible outcomes, all he could see was one subtracted from three then subtracted once again from two, leaving him locked away with a rifle that would turn suicide into an unpredictable gambit. Further on, he saw his skin turning sallow and gray as death finally overwhelmed him, sealing him inside this artificial tomb, no longer able to understand the complicated latchings of the door. Reduced to a ceaseless and pathetic scratching…
Which no one would ever hear, much less answer.
Larry shuddered. He gazed across the vault at his wife and son.
No, he finally decided, this was no way to die.
25
“Mike! Be careful!” Rudy cried, but in the time it took to shout the warning, it was already too late. Mike was kneeling down behind the low screen of the sofa, convinced he’d shot Keith dead. Rudy allowed that it might be true, but lowering one’s defenses within arm’s reach of an unconfirmed kill seemed a terrible lapse in judgment, almost as if he were giving up his own life in contrition.
Swearing under his breath, Rudy stepped around the cluttered plain of the coffee table and pointed his rifle at the prostrate form on the carpet, trying to get Mike out of his line of fire while keeping a bead on the pale smear of Keith’s head.
“Christ!” Mike moaned. “I killed him!” His shotgun clattered to the floor near his knee as he brought the penlight to bear on Keith’s face, his free hand reaching to feel for a pulse along his neck. Rudy shouted for him to back away, at the same time taking a step forward himself, bracing for the worst.
In the shifting pool of light, Keith looked like something that had been hauled off a smoking battlefield. There was a scattershot pattern of shotgun pellets across his right shoulder, his neck and upper chest, but he looked like he’d been in pretty bad shape before Mike even pulled the trigger; before they ever set foot in the house, in fact. A ragged flap of scalp hung like a loose pocket above his right temple, powderburned and accompanied by a devastating head wound. Also a deep gouge had been taken out of his chest, just above his heart, this one looking suspiciously like a bite mark.
Neither of these had come from Mike’s shotgun.
Keith had probably been wandering around the house in shock, his hair and clothes saturated with his own blood as well as that of his wife. At least he’d had the presence of mind to put a bullet into her.
By the sound of his breathing, by the shallow sobs that came between each exhalation, Rudy surmised Mike was having trouble finding a pulse. He could see for himself that Keith’s chest was no longer rising and falling.
“Mike,” he began, his finger curled tautly around the trigger, “I think perhaps you should—”
Back away from him, Rudy had meant to say, but Keith’s eyes were suddenly open, burning with the faint phosphorescence of Wormwood, and the words turned to dust on his tongue. Mike froze, a sharp gasp punctuating his surprise as Keith’s head darted up, quick as a cobra. Two of Mike Dawley’s fingers disappeared in a heartbeat, tumbling down the open gullet of his neighbor’s throat like mackerel down a shark. There was an impatient attempt at chewing, a vicious gnashing of incisors, then the fingers were gone.
Mike screamed, holding up his bloody hand as if it were on fire, capable of engulfing him.
A part of Rudy seemed to step back from his own body and gaze down from the vantage of a casual observer, a disinterested witness in a world that had slowed almost to a stop. He watched coolly as the more solid, practical part of him stepped forward, thrust the muzzle of the rifle against Keith’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. A nearly bloodless hole appeared, tunneling down through the decaying corridors of Keith’s brain.