And here were the results, spread out before them.
Twenty-four hours and the city was in ruins.
Only God, Larry decided, could work that quickly, and God had turned out to be something of a disappointment; a downright bastard, erasing people and cities like lines from a blackboard. Equations that didn’t balance.
He and Shane gazed at God’s handiwork until they couldn’t take it any longer, until each blink of the eye brought some new atrocity into focus: a church in flames, a shopping center collapsed upon itself, a park or schoolyard strewn with bodies.
And beneath it all, the sound of screams… the steady tat-tat-tat of small arms fire…
Carried up to them on the wings of the wind.
14
The man in the Impala had no face, just a ragged scream blasted into his skull large enough to thread an arm through. A shotgun lay stiffly against the steering wheel, both barrels fired and then fallen into a reverent silence.
Shane wondered if he’d ever get used to such sights, or if they’d cling to him like ghosts, haunting him until he sought the same unbearable release.
There was a note pinned to the man’s chest, folded neatly and addressed: To Whom It May Concern.
Larry knew what it would say the moment he saw it.
Dear Concerned,
I can’t live with myself. I shot my wife and two sons, and even though they had the disease and it was the right thing to do, I can’t get the images out of my head. I see their faces and I hear the sound of the rifle and I know there’s nothing left for me…
He’d written that much himself, scribbled it on the back of a canned food label while a grinning thing watched from its perch in the corner. He’d coughed up those awful, despairing words and then he’d burned them, ashamed, unable to take that final step, to even suggest it on paper.
Yet the idea had never left his mind, and part of him wondered if he’d gone ahead with this trip on the chance he’d never return. The same part of him that still believed that suicide was God’s one unpardonable sin.
He looked at the man in the Impala. At the devastating hole where his face had been.
In the end, what could a simple note say?
That he was in torment, in pain?
They could see that well enough themselves.
Shane reached in and unpinned the sheet from the man’s bloody shirt. As he started to unfold it, Larry snatched it from him, unable to take on the man’s burden. He refolded it and stuffed it into his back pocket, unread.
Shane looked at him, puzzled.
Larry shook his head. “It doesn’t concern us,” he said, turning back to the bike.
15
The north side of the ridge dropped quickly down a canyon and spit them out at a stalled collision. A twisted meeting of pickup, car and trailer which had appeared around a blind corner and sent them skidding toward the ditch.
Shane felt the bike begin to shimmy through a spill of broken glass, the engine protesting as Larry downshifted and they sputtered past the chrome hook of a partially detached bumper, the Yamaha finally arriving at a tentative stop on the graveled shoulder.
“Are you all right?” Larry called back, letting the motor drop to a steady idle.
“All right,” Shane agreed, though in truth it had been a very near thing. He felt lightheaded and sick, his arms and legs trembling while his heart beat thunderously against his eardrums.
Wreckage was sprawled across the roadway, the pickup and trailer jackknifed and flipped over with the hood of the Cadillac folded deep inside, as if the long luxury car had come sailing down the canyon and around the corner just as the pickup had been struggling onto the roadway. Bits of plastic, lumps of glass and crumpled metal had been thrown about like weightless confetti. There were dented cans of food, burst batteries, scatters of loose bullets… none of which had done them much good in the end. Articles of clothing and personal items had been thrown all over the shoulder and into the bordering field like leftovers from a garage sale.
Larry and Shane more or less paddled the motorcycle through the debris, touching a foot down here and a foot down there until they were clear of the worst of it. Larry spotted something of interest along the far shoulder and brought the bike to a halt, pointing it out to Shane.
“What is it?” he asked, uncertain. “Some sort of explosive?”
“No, road flares,” Larry told him, adding they might come in handy if they ended up in a cave like Fred Meyer. “Why don’t you grab them?” he suggested. “I’ll move the bike forward a bit in case someone comes barreling down that hill.”
“All right,” Shane agreed, pushing himself off the back of the seat.
“If you hear a car coming, get yourself clear of that wreck,” Larry warned, angling the Yamaha toward the south shoulder, giving it a little gas. When he had it a safe distance from the crash, he turned and saw Shane crouched down on the pavement, gathering up flares.
Something seemed to distract Shane and he paused, his head angled toward the heart of the collision. Hurriedly, he picked up the last few flares then trotted quickly back to Larry and the bike, his face a pale grimace.
“What’s the matter?” Larry asked, concerned.
Shane cocked his head toward the twisted steel.
“There are still things moving around in there
16
Summertides was only another mile or so ahead, but it was a dangerous mile, with the passing houses gathering closer to one another, marching increasingly toward the road. Shane and Larry saw bodies wandering like sunstricken hoboes along the shoulders of the road, across the road itself, and deep inside the open pastures.
Along one of the last stretches of undeveloped land, they came across a small herd of cattle that lay in bloodied lumps, as if the animals had wandered inadvertently into a minefield. There were people too — Wormwood casualties — crawling amongst the torn remains, feeding off the raw lumps of flesh. They began to take notice of the passing motorcycle and Larry opened the throttle a little more. There was no speedometer, but to Shane it felt like thirty five or forty. Fast enough to break bones or scrape off skin if something got in front of them.
Fortunately, nothing did.
17
Summertides, however, was a different story; its fate not at all as Shane or Larry had imagined.
Normally, the drive past the golf course was like cruising alongside a large and sprawling park. The landscape was green and well-tended, as desirable to the eye as the groups of condominiums that had been built up along its westward border. Quiet, unobtrusive, with gated cul-de-sacs and discreet privacy signs to discourage idlers and passing tourists.
Not so any longer…
Wormwood reminded them that Summertides, despite its isolation and well-groomed links, was actually a densely-populated residential district; an easy fact to overlook because the people who could afford to live there were well-to-do and (by and large) of retirement age. They were a population that enjoyed itself quietly and — aside from a round of golf or a summer cocktail party — indoors. Even the RV park on the south side kept itself neat and well-behaved, filled with white-haired retirees and migrating snowbirds who had more money invested in their trailers than most people did in their homes and savings accounts.
And when Wormwood hit, it cut through the place like a buzzsaw.
Because the residents were aging, there was a much greater incidence of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease… the sort of conditions that will lead to heart attacks and strokes… which in turn will generate lots of dead bodies, especially if a sudden shock like Wormwood descends and they can’t get to a doctor or hospital.