She was just as he’d left her, her face slack, eyes gazing up at the place where he’d been kneeling. Without ceremony or sentiment, he put the point of the shaft against the smooth white curve of her forehead. Gripping it with both hands, he closed his eyes and dropped his weight down sharply, like a man falling through a trapdoor to Hell.
There was a moment of hesitation, a stubborn crack, and the post dropped a few final inches, enough to carry the point deep into the stirring tissue of her brain.
Larry exhaled, a sheen of sweat clinging to his pale brow. When he opened his eyes, Shane was standing over him, splattered with blood, the axe hanging loosely in one hand and the reclaimed penlight in the other. Larry thought he looked about forty years older.
“I tried to stop her,” Shane said, looking into her eyes.
Larry nodded, rising wearily to his feet. “I know you did. I did, too. There was nothing we could do about it.” He pointed his flashlight down the aisle, refusing to look at Rachel’s corpse, knowing that if he did she would haunt him forever. The beam picked up some lumps and scattered limbs; a butcher shop ravaged by dogs. “I’m sorry I wasn’t much help,” he said, bringing the light back to Shane.
The boy shrugged, and then sent a chill down Larry’s spine by admitting: “I might not have known it was you.”
A moan sounded somewhere toward the front of the store. It was answered by another, much closer.
“C’mon,” Larry sighed, swinging his light through the rafters. “Let’s get those drugs and find a place to rest. My back is killing me.”
4
Shane lit a road flare and the area around the pharmacy filled with an eerie pink light. The counter itself (and all the drugs it contained) lay behind a roll-down security gate; one that was locked with a long-gone key. Fortunately, they’d brought along a master.
“Stand back. Get behind me,” Larry directed, unholstering his revolver and pointing it at the lock. He waited until Shane was in position before firing his first round, which missed the lock entirely and drilled a path through a Viagra display.
“Shit,” Larry swore and took a step closer, the muzzle less than a yard from its target now. He tightened his face as if he expected the lock to turn to shrapnel and squeezed the trigger. There was a sound like an aluminum bat striking a brick wall and a corresponding wave which clattered up the gate. The lock itself looked stunned, its face brightly hammered, but it clung tenaciously to its hasp.
“Son of a bitch,” Larry exhaled, his voice dark and impatient. He put the gun a foot closer and the noise was repeated, more solidly this time. As the wave retreated, a line of solid space appeared at the bottom of the gate.
“Ha!” Larry brightened. “We’re in business!”
There was a shuffle behind them. A stack of discount books slipped off a display table and Shane turned to see something which had once carted groceries out to parked cars. A boy no older than himself, dressed in a white shirt and reflectorized vest. He had a Fred Meyer nametag that read “Corpse” in the shifting light of the flare. It looked like he’d been hit by a car, drug through the parking lot, run over one or twice, and then had found his way back inside the store. He looked pleased to find them, as if he’d been searching for quite some time.
“More trouble,” Shane said, the words lost as Larry rolled up the noisy gate.
The two of them ducked underneath and pulled the barricade quickly back down, the weighted edge narrowly missing Shane’s foot.
They found themselves pressed into a space roughly fifteen feet by two, the tall pharmacy counter pressed right against their backs.
Larry laughed softly through the metal latticework, stepping down on the bottom of the gate with his boot. The bagboy — whose name was actually “Court”, Shane saw — hissed like a reptile and extended his arms toward the gate, his fingers working themselves into the gaps, shaking the tightly interwoven links.
Larry made a motion with his head to indicate the space on the other side of the counter. “Why don’t you go ahead and get the things you need,” he suggested, his face still grinning (though Shane couldn’t imagine why). “I’ll stay here and entertain our new friend.”
Shane nodded and sidestepped to an open space of countertop beside the cash register. Jumping up, the heels of his palms planted and his feet kicking up the gate, he was able to get his seat high enough to roll back and tuck his legs over.
His boots touched down on a padded mat and he turned, the pills smiling back at him in neat, unmolested rows.
5
At first Shane thought he’d lost the shopping list; that he’d hooked it out of his pocket by the river or somewhere else along the way: a long list of drugs that all sounded alike, none of which he’d bothered to commit to memory.
He went through his pockets in an escalating panic, certain now it was gone and the whole trip was going to be for nothing; that he’d end up guessing and bring his father home a lifetime supply of estrogen supplements or stool softeners.
Slow down, he told himself, his heart beating frantically as he stood in the dark pocket at the back of the store. Look again, and this time start with the last place you remember it.
That would be his back pocket. He’d stuffed it in his front jeans pocket when his mom had given it to him because he was afraid it might somehow wiggle out of the back on the seat of the motorcycle. Then when they’d left the bike back in the orchard, he’d transferred the list to his back pocket because he didn’t want it getting in the way of his spare ammunition.
He reached into his right back pocket again and there it was, just where he’d left it.
My fingers must have slipped under it the first time, he decided, unfolding the scrap of paper with great care, as if it might take a mind to disappear again.
The spot of his penlight trembled slowly down the list and, squinting, Shane began to speak the names loud enough for Larry to hear.
6
“Van-co-my-cin,” Shane read laboriously, drawing the syllables out until they sounded more like a first-year reading primer than antibiotics. “Kef-lex. Te-quin. A-mox-i-cill-an.”
Larry lifted his head. “You okay back there?” It sounded like the kid was asleep and dreaming in Latin.
Shane murmured words to the affirmative, still in that same slow voice. He began to whisper the syllables again, this time drawing them closer, coming out with distinct words, some of which Larry recognized and some he didn’t.
Court seemed lulled by the sound, as if the words were a far-off melody he’d been rocked to sleep to during his childhood. His blood-scabbed fingers cascaded softly down the gate.
“Morphine, Lidocain, Novocain.” These said with greater certainty.
Larry watched the dead kid’s face: a devastated lump of adolescence a mere eighteen inches from his own. Beneath the damage, there was a tug of expression, a faint recognition… like a dog who hears a word it knows within a distant conversation.
Larry raised his penlight and the glow of Wormwood abated, though Court’s pupils remained the same, neither contracting nor dilating as he moved the light from side to side. There was a smell coming off him like discarded meat trays on a hot day or fruit rotting in the darkness beneath a kitchen sink. A sweet decay.
Court raised his arms again and banged them against the gate, as if prodded by his disease, then calmed again as Larry began to sing, picking up Shane’s whisper as he rummaged through the bottles, turning it into a song.
“Vancomycin, Vancomycin; somebody bring me some Vancomycin.