“Unless what?” Marie frowned, but Shane was already moving, running toward the door of the nearest house. The one with the singed garage.
Confused and alarmed, she ran after him.
4
Marie Barrow had been alone in her house for 15 days.
The first week had been spent waiting for her father to return from her aunt and uncle’s, a round trip of less than eight miles. At the end of that week, Wormwood had fallen out of the sky like God’s final judgment and Marie had come to the hard realization that her father wasn’t coming back. That something had happened to him along the way.
In the dark days since that realization, she began to wait for something else. She didn’t know exactly who or what that something might be, but her father had left his shotgun, along with plenty of ammunition, food, and water to fill the lonely days until she decided.
She had seen the motorcycle and its two riders pass along the road the previous day, without stopping or seeming to take notice of the house at all. She had watched it from her bedroom window until it was swallowed by a shaggy copse of willows, and then she had watched the willow branches sway until the beelike sound of the engine’s passage had faded to a distant drone.
Good, she thought, letting the curtain fall back into place, the room resuming its former cast, which was a dusky shade of brown, like an antique photograph. There would have been no room on the motorbike for an extra rider, and the simple fact that they outnumbered her two-to-one was reason enough to fear them.
But then the following day the bike came back. It was the same one, she was sure of it, only now one of the riders was gone. Disappeared just like her father.
The engine sputtered in the pale blue twilight and a dark lump of fear clotted in her chest as she watched the rider dismount and push the bike toward her along the long gray line of the driveway.
Marie left the window long enough to get her father’s shotgun. She broke it open and checked the breach, making certain both barrels were loaded.
She hesitated, wondering if the stranger would have a gun of his own, then decided it didn’t matter.
One way or another, her long wait would be over.
5
Shane rapped on the door of Larry Hanna’s former house and, when no one answered, tried the door handle. It was locked, of course, but this in no way discouraged him; on the contrary, he took it as a hopeful sign, a minor obstacle.
By this time Marie was standing beside him. Her eyes grew wide as he stepped back and put his shoulder to the door, hitting it once… twice… three times before pausing to reconsider his options. The frame and the deadbolt felt like welded steel, like something he could go on butting until his shoulder turned black.
“Whose house is this?” Marie wondered, squinting up at the second story windows, the light spray of freckles on her nose wrinkling.
“The Hanna’s,” Shane answered, searching around the step for a tool he might use to get past the lock. “Larry’s,” he added, the word slipping out under his breath.
“The man who went with you to Fred Meyer?”
Shane nodded. He hit the door twice more and found himself no closer to breaking it down than he had on the first try. He thought about using his shotgun on the deadbolt and then thought better of it, his eyes settling on one of the plywood-covered windows.
“Why do you want inside?” Marie asked, quietly pointing out the fact that if anyone on Quail Street had survived, they surely would have heard him battering on the door.
“Not if they’re inside the bomb shelter,” he said, moving along the front of the house. He was too busy testing the grip of the nails on the first sheet of plywood to notice her expression.
“Bomb shelter?”
“Yeah,” Shane nodded, grimacing as the plywood began to creak. Encouraged, he glanced over at her.
“C’mere and give me a hand with this.”
6
Even in the gloomy light of the barn she could see his guns, though they didn’t frighten her. It was reasonable to travel with guns these days. Sensible. So instead of the guns she studied his face. He was younger than she’d first imagined; younger, perhaps, than herself. She had frightened him, and that was reasonable too, considering where he was standing, but now that he’d turned he was regaining his composure.
Marie watched his eyes and found that they gazed steadily back at her. They did not pretend to meet her own or slide from side to side, plotting and planning. Likewise, his feet remained at a satisfied distance.
“What do you want?” she asked, the shotgun pointed at his chest.
“Nothing,” he told her. “Only a place to rest… to get off the road for the night.”
She sensed that he was telling the truth, a truth not only in his words, but in his eyes.
“Is it dangerous at night?” she asked, feeling the urge to glance back at the darkness settling over the fields behind her. Feeling it like a maddening itch between her shoulderblades.
“It’s dangerous all the time.”
She nodded, as if she suspected this also was true, and they studied one another for a long moment.
“I don’t mean you any harm,” he said, his eyes dropping briefly to indicate the shotgun. “I thought the house was empty.”
“Did you?” Marie sensed this was not entirely the truth, but neither was it a lie. Perhaps it was something he didn’t entirely understand himself. She lowered the barrel an inch or two. “What’s your name?”
“Shane,” he answered.
“Shane,” she repeated, her voice stepping back, turning inward. The name conjured up images of old television westerns and leather-skinned gunfighters. The hot, flat glare of the sun and a dusty place where death was never far away. Marie decided that he had gunfighter’s eyes: a dark shade of gray now, but in the sunlight they would turn to an overcast and guarded blue. She felt herself drawn to him and decided to trust that feeling. She lowered the muzzle of the shotgun to the hard and oily ground.
“The house isn’t empty,” she told him, “but it’s too big for just one person.” She tried on a hesitant smile. “I’ve felt like a ghost rattling around inside.” The smile faded until only her hesitancy remained. “If what you say is true… if you really don’t mean any harm, then you might as well come inside for the night.”
Shane nodded, grateful, and followed her in.
7
He missed the door on the first pass, not knowing where the shelter was; hearing about it secondhand from his parents and Rudy Cheng, and then only briefly, as if it were a grave or sepulcher they’d rather not think about. Shane himself had been imagining something in the basement, like a submarine hatch: something leading deeper into the earth. After several minutes of fruitless searching, he came back to the bend in the stairs and the door seemed to pop out at him. At first he thought it was a storage nook — a cramped, cobwebby space filled with old clothes and Christmas decorations — but on second glance, the door looked much too wide for that. Much too solid.