Shane shook his head as if he couldn’t accept this. His trip couldn’t have been for nothing.
“She wanted me to give you something,” Rudy remembered, reaching into his back pocket, his trembling hand coming out with a folded envelope, the gummed flap still sealed. He gave it to Shane with an air of relief, as if a great responsibility had been taken from his shoulders. Shane unfolded it, finding his name in his mother’s handwriting looped across the creases. As Rudy finished what little there was left to tell, Shane tore it open.
“After she handed that to me, she went back inside to sit with your father. About an hour later, after dark, the two of them came outside… I saw them in the moonlight. They were… they were both infected.”
“Oh Shane,” Marie said, her voice heavy with sympathy as she reached out to touch him.
Tears spattered across the face of the note.
Dear, dear son, it began.
10
The two of them lay together on Marie’s narrow bed, the heat from their lovemaking cooling now, soaking into the creaking timbers of the house.
“Shane?” Marie whispered, wondering if he’d fallen asleep, his head heavy on her breast.
Sluggishly he stirred. “Hmm.”
The candle on the nightstand stuttered, the blackened wick hissing in a pool of wax.
“When you leave tomorrow, will you take me with you?”
He opened his eyes and lifted his head, surprised. “What about your dad?”
A pained expression passed over her face, like the shadow of a bird, one that she made an effort to shoo away, though it left a tear trailing down her cheek. “I think…” — she wiped the tear away — “I think that if he could have come back, he would have been here by now. I think…” — again she stumbled, clearly having trouble declaring him dead — “that if he couldn’t make it back, he would have wanted me to find someone like you.”
She broke down crying and Shane took her in his arms, letting the poison and the tremors pass through him and out toward the shadow-laden corners of the room, like ripples in a summer pond. And when she had quieted enough to hear him, Shane kissed her face and whispered in her ear that of course, of course she could come with him, if that was what she wanted. He had only been thinking of a way to ask.
She started to cry all over again, only this time her tears weren’t bitter.
They made love again before sleep came — insistent in its calling — and when she hesitantly told him that she wasn’t using birth control, Shane laughed softly in the flickering light.
“That’s all right,” he said, his hand on the warm curve of her thigh. “The way things are, the idea of birth control seems a little silly, doesn’t it? Like spitting in the face of God.”
Marie hugged him closer, more confident than ever in her decision
By the time the candle sputtered and drowned, they were asleep in each other’s arms.
11
“What about the fire?” Shane asked, and this seemed to cause Rudy more pain than having to tell him about his parents; a devastating pain that couldn’t be shrugged off with the delivery of a good-bye note.
“I set fire to my own house,” Rudy admitted and these words cut his insides like a tangle of thorns that he could neither pass nor digest.
“Why?” Shane asked, his voice quiet but insistent, causing Rudy’s face to crumple in on itself like a useless wad of paper. He made a choked sound and two long tears crept out of the creases beneath his glasses.
“Because I’m a coward!” Rudy cried, the thick green venom, the bitter self-hatred bubbling out of him freely now. “Because I was too weak to shoot my own family!”
Shane took an unconscious step back as if Rudy might explode, splattering everything in the stairwell with a powerful corrosive.
“Aimee and I were sleeping because I’d been up most of the night… and a man, a man came to the door in a Federal Express uniform. One of the kids… either John or Denise must have let him in because he, he… he killed them both before Aimee and I even knew he was in the house!”
Shane shook his head, a prophetic chill creeping slowly up the back of his neck. Filed neatly away in his memory, he saw a white Fed-Ex van overturned in a weedy ditch, the motorbike veering to give it a wide berth, he and Larry having just set out from Quail Street. The dead driver appeared around the next bend and Shane had put the grisly aberration squarely in his sights… but he hadn’t pulled the trigger. The man was easily bypassed and they hadn’t brought enough ammunition to shoot indiscriminately.
Now here was the result: a man’s entire family dead. Shane wanted to clap his hands over his ears, but Rudy kept right on sobbing.
“I, I shot him in the living room… then I took my son and daughter out to the street and shot them both like rabid dogs. I shot them in the head and, and after all that we couldn’t find Sarah. We couldn’t find my oldest girl.”
Rudy shook his head wistfully, as if he should have known better, and in that gesture Shane sensed that the worst of the tale was yet to come. He glanced at Marie and saw tears on her cheeks, her attitude both sympathetic and horrified, as if she couldn’t decide whether to reach out to Rudy or turn and run screaming up the stairs.
“I went looking outside for her, walking from house to house calling her name, deciding she’d run away and taken shelter somewhere else, somewhere nearby… but she hadn’t.” Rudy looked up in agitation, struggling with his composure, and now Marie did reach out and touch his arm. The gesture seemed to steady him, to lend him the strength he needed to get through the rest of it. “She’d seen it all,” he went on, tears flowing down his cheeks. “She saw what I’d done to her brother and sister and decided she didn’t want to live anymore. She, she went upstairs to her closet and pushed herself deep inside, back behind all her outgrown dresses. She’d taken… she taken my pocket knife from on top of the dresser and she cut her wrists with it. She cut her own wrists and then bled to death in the back of her closet.”
Rudy took a long, shuddering breath, as if resigned now to his fate. “When I came back to the house Aimee had found her, or Sarah had found her mother… in the end I suppose there’s no real difference. They were both dead, infected… but after John and Denise, I couldn’t bring myself to shoot them. I lured them into the garage instead and locked them inside.”
Rudy shook his head as if lost. “After that, I wandered around the house, listening to them scratch and moan at the door. I don’t know for how long… long enough for me to find the bloody footprints leading out of Sarah’s closet and the pocket knife lying inside, the blade folded neatly back inside its casing, which would have been just like her. I, I thought about using it on my own wrists, but that wouldn’t have solved anything… and I still had unfinished business waiting in the garage.” He looked at Shane and then Marie, his eyes imploring. “I couldn’t just leave them like that!”