Wormwood Read online

  Wormwood

  by

  Michael James McFarland

  Part One:

  Clouds On The Horizon

  1

  “We strongly caution viewers that the footage about to be broadcast is of a highly graphic and unsettling nature. Viewer discretion is advised.”

  The blonde anchor in the blue tie and somber jacket glanced nervously off-camera, swallowed as if there were a gun pointed at his head, then gazed back into the lens.

  “I’d like to take a moment to remind our audience that it has never been the policy of this station, or its parent network, to panic or unduly alarm our viewership in bringing such events to public attention, or in any way exploit or sensationalize any such footage we may receive. That said, the videotape we’re about to present is uncensored and unedited in hopes that viewers might better prepare themselves for what is happening in the eastern portion of the country and which, by all reliable indicators, may spread our way in the coming days and weeks.

  “This footage comes to us from our affiliate station in Chicago and was shot by W.N.C. cameraman Dennis Kabrich in the neighboring community of Elmhurst. Once again, what you are about to witness is real and is attributed to the so-called ‘Wormwood’ or ‘Yellowseed’ virus, first reported near the town of Willard, Pennsylvania, just two short months ago. This footage is of an extremely graphic nature and viewer discretion is strongly advised.”

  With that, the cautions ceased and the videotape rolled.

  Through the safety and insulation of the television screen, Larry Hanna and Rudy Cheng were transported from the quiet comfort of the Cheng’s rec room and thrust into an alley in Elmhurst, Illinois, where the Wormwood epidemic was running riot all around them. The two men leaned forward, anxious to make sense of what they were seeing, then shrank back, stunned and sickened, as the horrors contained within the tape became increasingly clear.

  The footage began with a pitch and a sprawl, as if Dennis Kabrich, W.N.C.’s unfortunate cameraman, had fallen at a dead run. The sky flashed briefly, overcast and gray, and then two men toting automatic rifles hauled him to his feet. They fled after a group of four or five other men, all in gray-green fatigues, all running down the alley in a loose arrowhead formation, rifles at the ready.

  The alley was closing up, coming to an end as a tall chain-link fence crowned with barbed-wire became apparent. On the other side lay a cross street, a scorched elm tree and a broad field of sodden grass. A two-story brick building stood at a distance in the field, looking for all the world like a bank vault or a castle keep, a place of unquestioning safety.

  There was a wide gate in the fence, the post wrapped in steel chain and secured with a padlock, and as the group came to a halt, one man pointing his rifle at the lock, something shuffled at them from a dark garage to their immediate left. It looked like a scarecrow, its stuffing bursting from its gray skin in raw patches, and the noise it made was like a man drowning in syrup.

  The squad turned.

  “Shit! Look out”

  One of the men screamed as the horror clamped onto him, its head dipping toward his neck and then jerking savagely away. A bright jet of arterial blood painted a fatal slash on the dingy white face of the garage.

  The rest of the squad opened fire and pieces of flesh began to explode like wet sandbags. The soldier and the scarecrow fell to the gravel together and, as one of the remaining men turned back to the gate and made shrapnel out of the padlock, another unholstered his sidearm and stepped over the bodies they’d just put down.

  Dennis Kabrich, his hands far from steady, brought the man and the pistol into focus as the soldier extended his arm and fired four shots into the writhing mass.

  The dead soldier and the scarecrow sighed and grew still, tangled in a final embrace.

  The squad moved through the gate and the camera followed, sparing only the briefest glance at the ground in passing. Spreading back into an arrowhead, they paused to kneel and fire at the occasional target while crossing the wide strip of asphalt. Dimly, at a distance, there were ragged screams and frantic bursts of automatic gunfire.

  The camera halted in the street to pan left and then right, taking in the entire scope of the chaos. What appeared in the frame looked like the cooling remains of a five-day riot. Houses and apartment buildings were blackened and smoking, cars were smashed into one another, tipped on their sides or accordianed into power poles. Glass and debris littered the sidewalk and bodies lay like heaps of rags in the streets.

  The destruction stretched on as far as the eye could see. Shadows stepped in and out of view, ragged figures inevitably drawn toward the heat or the smell or the focused movement of the squad, and as they appeared they were cut down, their mouths making the same drowning scream again and again — more frustration than any sense of pain or dying.

  But then, they were already dead.

  It was Wormwood that was making them walk again.

  “My God.” Larry Hanna shook his head against the grim reality of the scene. “My God!” he whispered again, his complexion pale and nauseated.

  Rudy Cheng’s hooded eyes glanced at his neighbor and then went back to the TV screen, one hand raised to his chin, stroking it as the squad of soldiers ran full-out across the grounds of an elementary school, chopping down anything that got in their way.

  The camera picked out random morsels to broadcast:

  A pile of burned bodies, as tall as a haystack…

  A dead woman who’d wandered out in her nightgown…

  A black dog feeding on the blanched corpse of a preschooler.

  “I don’t think I can deal with this,” Larry moaned, stepping over the coffee table in his haste to reach the bathroom.

  Rudy watched him go, wondering if any of them would have much choice.

  2

  Rudy’s wife Aimee awoke groggily as he slipped into bed several hours later. Her head turned automatically toward the clock. “It’s almost two o’clock!” she said, surprised. “Are you just coming to bed?”

  He nodded then switched off the reading lamp on his side of the bed, letting darkness retake the room. Gradually, the moonlight in the curtains cast enough of a glow for him to see by. The dresser and the chair to the left side of the bed, the dark halo of his wife’s hair against the pillow, the vague smiles of his three children gazing out of oak frames on the far wall. Sarah, Denise and John, arranged in a diagonal line, oldest to youngest. He found his eyes kept returning to them, wondering if there would be new portraits to take their place the coming fall, each of them a year older. He wondered if any of them would be alive to have their pictures taken, never mind the school or the photographer.

  The thought brought back the final few minutes of the videotape he and Larry had watched on the news. The squad of soldiers perched in a sniper’s line atop the school gymnasium, firing down at unseen targets while a man screamed for help in the background.

  It might have been his daughters’ school, or his son’s.

  Or he himself might be up there, firing a rifle.

  Or screaming for help.

  His wife and children the blackened bodies piled high on the soccer field.

  The essence of the broadcast was that the experimental treatments and vaccines had all failed. Wormwood had jumped the quarantine lines and was heading west, bringing death and destruction to big cities and small towns alike. It was not in its nature to leave any stones unturned (much less an entire lot of them) and the chances of his whole family escaping the epidemic unscathed was about the same as walking between the raindrops of a spring downpour.

  His wife’s hand reached out and touched him.

  “You’re tense,” she told him gently, moving her palm over his chest. “I can feel it coming off you
in waves.”

  He sighed and took her hand, kissing it before setting it aside and turning his back to her.

  She drew slow circles on his back and felt his breathing deepen as he sank into the padded arms of the mattress.

  “We need to start making plans,” he told her, his face to the wall, nudging her out of a warm drowse. “We need to start getting ready for this thing.”

  Aimee propped herself up on an elbow. “Rudy, Chicago is almost two thousand miles away. They’ll figure out how to stop it before it gets much further.”

  He flipped himself on his back and gazed at the ceiling. “I wish I could believe that.”

  “That news report must have been something to tie you in knots like this.”

  “It was. I don’t know whether to wish you’d seen it or be grateful you didn’t.”

  “Well you know how television can be. They like to play things up, make them look bigger than they actually are. With the right editing and camera angles, they can turn a five man street scuffle into civil unrest. What they didn’t show you is how normal things are a block or two away. You only saw what they wanted you to see.”

  He nodded, thinking of the pile of bodies and the black dog, the line of gunners on the roof.

  “This looked like the apocalypse.”

  She laughed softly in the dark. “People have been seeing the apocalypse for two thousand years.”

  A dead man came shambling out of a dingy garage and then disintegrated in a storm of gunfire, taking a screaming soldier with him.

  “This looked pretty convincing.”

  The bedroom lapsed into silence.

  “What have you been doing all night?” she finally asked.

  “Watching the news. Thinking about what I’ll do when this thing finally shows up.”

  “If this thing shows up,” she amended, touching a finger to his lips.

  “If,” he allowed, though not believing it. Aside from the Chicago video, more snapshots of the epidemic were surfacing, opening up like new doors to Hell. And that was just the television; he didn’t even want to look at the internet. It didn’t matter if you called it Wormwood or Yellowseed, it wasn’t the sort of thing that just petered out of its own volition. It had a maw the size of Texas and wasn’t likely to stop chewing until there was nothing left but silent earth and rotting dead.

  “What sorts of plans have you been making?” Aimee asked, though hesitantly.

  “I drew a map of the neighborhood,” Rudy told her.

  “That sounds harmless enough,” Aimee said, relieved.

  “Maybe I’ll show it to some of the neighbors tomorrow,” he decided. “See if anyone else has given this serious thought.”

  3

  “It occurs to me,” Rudy began, reaching into his hip pocket and unfolding the map, “that if we stick together as a neighborhood, we can defend ourselves better than we could as individual houses. Look here,” he said to Larry, who was stubbornly disinclined to look at his map. “We have a unique situation in that we live in a cul-de-sac with the creek to one side and the hillside to another. Natural barriers that make the street easier to defend.”

  “Son of a bitch, Rudy,” Larry whispered, glancing around to see if anyone had heard him. “Are you nuts? What are you doing talking like this, drawing up a map? Deliberately trying to start a panic?”

  “No, I just thought we should be as prepared as possible for wh-”

  “Prepared for what? That joke we saw on TV? Come on!” Larry scoffed, red blotches appearing high on his cheeks. He gestured at the map in open contempt, as if he’d like to snatch it out of Rudy’s hands and erase his name from the domino-shaped rectangle they were standing in front of.

  Rudy looked at his next-door neighbor and adjusted his glasses. “If you think that what we saw last night was a joke, you’re badly mistaken Larry.” He nodded at the house, as if including it in their conversation. “Go inside and turn on your set. If it’s a joke, it’s awfully contagious.”

  Larry smiled, shaking his head to show he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. “You know, with a few friends and a camcorder, I could put together a pretty convincing tape too. Nothing as good as the one last night, but then I’m an accountant, not a liberal arts major with no job and too much time on my hands. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, swinging an arm toward the house, “I’ve got some pruning to do before lunch.”

  “If it helps, think of it as a storm,” Rudy suggested, “a hurricane. Take your truck down to the lumberyard and pick up some plywood. Stock up on canned goods and bottled water, maybe some candles and extra batteries. It never hurts to be prepared.”

  “There’s nothing to be prepared for,” Larry maintained, turning back toward his garage.

  “Do you have a gun?” Rudy asked, raising his voice.

  Larry Hanna stopped along the zigzag of a patched crack and turned slowly around. What Rudy saw behind his pale blue eyes was another sort of patch, one that was under a great deal of stress at the moment.

  “You know I do,” he said. “We went shooting with it last fall up at the pond. My dad’s target rifle.”

  Rudy nodded. He remembered the rifle well: a single-shot .22 with a barrel as heavy as a cast iron skillet. It wouldn’t be much good in close quarters (except possibly as a club), but perched on a rooftop with a good scope, it would help keep Wormwood at a distance.

  “You might at least pick up some ammunition,” Rudy said.

  Larry opened his mouth to say something then shut it again. He took a step toward the curb, as if he couldn’t bear to shout his reply; that shouting might be overheard and lend his neighbor’s crackpot theories more credence.

  “You’re not joking, are you? You really think that what happened in Chicago could happen here?”

  Rudy regarded him for a moment, torn between the truth and not wanting to frighten him away. “At this point, Larry, I just think we ought to talk about it. Prepare ourselves for the possibility. I wouldn’t want to hear that it’s come after all the stores have been picked clean and it’s too late to do anything about it.” He raised a leading eyebrow. “Would you?”

  “I guess not,” Larry allowed. “If I thought anything was coming.”

  Rudy nodded. “Why don’t you come over to the house this afternoon? I’ll talk to a few others in the neighborhood — Bud Iverson and maybe the Dawleys — and see what they think about this?”

  Larry pressed his lips together and gazed down the short length of Quail Street, his jaw grinding back and forth, undecided. “I’ll think about it,” he finally said.

  “That’s fine. About three o’clock?”

  Larry nodded once in acknowledgement; again, giving the idea as little weight and gravity as possible. To give more would be to imply there was some reason to meet in the first place, which there most certainly was not. “What about Jan?” he wondered. “Should she come too?”

  Rudy gave this some thought. “Why don’t we just keep it amongst the men for now,” he decided. “If we decide there’s reason to proceed, we’ll bring in the wives at the next meeting.”

  “Yeah, well…” Larry’s expression turned weary and sour, as if he’d committed himself to picking up trash along the highway for the next two weekends. “I can tell you right now how I’m going to vote on the prospect of future meetings. It’s bad enough that I’m considering this one.”

  Rudy took a deep breath and let it out. “Try to come with an open mind, Larry.”

  “I’m not even promising I’ll come,” Larry replied, “but if I do, I’ll come with the mind I’ve got.”

  Rudy nodded, spying Bud Iverson’s Cadillac sailing quietly up the street, as regal and as polished as when it left the showroom floor. It turned squarely into its driveway, waited patiently while the electric garage door opened, then came to rest on its spotless concrete pad.

  Folding his map in half, Rudy excused himself and hurried over before the garage could swing shut again.

  4
>
  At 62, Bud Iverson was the undisputed patriarch of Quail Street. He and Helen had bought their house thirty years ago and raised four daughters in the immaculate split-level standing adjacent to the Hanna’s. All four girls had since moved out — the youngest heading off to college three years ago — leaving Bud and Helen to rattle about the oversized house on their own. The Cadillac gave Bud something to fawn over in the absence of his daughters, while Helen simply redoubled her efforts in the flowerbeds and garden.

  She served Rudy and her husband tall glasses of iced tea and then withdrew from the room to let them talk, saying she’d be in the back yard if Janie, their eldest daughter, called. The two of them were going out shopping together after lunch.

  Bud nodded in acknowledgement then waited until his wife was out of earshot. He looked Rudy over, his gaze penetrating: a sharp and steely blue beneath his wild gray eyebrows. “I take it this has something to do with the troubles we’re having back east?” he said, drawing his conclusion from the brief exchange he and Rudy had passed in the driveway.

  Rudy nodded. “I thought it might be a good idea to get together as a neighborhood. Possibly draw up a contingency plan in case it comes our way.” He hesitated as Bud continued to stare across the table at him, as unflinching as a seasoned general. “I saw some footage on the news last night that was fairly shocking. It came out of Chicago, so there’s no question that it’s moving in our direction.”

  “I believe I saw the same footage,” Bud said, picking up his iced tea and gazing deep into the glass, past the lemon slice and crushed ice to where a fine brown sediment had settled on the bottom, almost invisible to the naked eye. Bud seemed to read something of the future down there. “What exactly did you have in mind?” he wondered.

  “At this point, nothing specific… other than getting together and discussing it.” He picked up his glass out of nervousness. “Truthfully, I’m open to just about anything.”