Wormwood (9 page)

Mike and Keith were just finishing the front of the Sturling’s house when Shane shouted out on the rooftop above.  With a sudden sour feeling in his gut, Mike trotted out to the middle of the yard (still holding his hammer), glanced left and right down Kennedy Street, then looked up at his son.

The boy was lying flat on the eastward slope of the roof, the rifle up to his eye and the business end pointed down toward the Sturling’s back yard.

“What is it, son?” Mike called up.

Shane cast a quick glance down at his father.  “There’s a couple of men sneaking around underneath the bridge,” he answered, his voice almost a whisper, snatched away on the breeze.

Keith had joined Mike out on the lawn.  “Are they armed?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”  Another glance down, as if to assure himself they were still there.  “As soon as I saw the first one, he ducked back into the shadows.  The other just poked his head out a second ago.”

Rudy and Bud came trotting across the street.  “What’s happening?” Bud asked, his voice sharp and gruff, as one who’s accustomed to giving commands and having them followed.  Despite the frailness of his age, something in his blue-gray eyes looked twenty years younger.

“The kid says there’s a couple of men under the creek bridge,” Keith answered, “acting like unfriendlies, but he’s not sure if they’re armed or not.”

Bud nodded and squinted up at Shane.  “Listen up, son,” he called, cupping his hands around his mouth to make himself heard.  “If they start advancing toward the houses, fire a warning shot into the creek bed.  If it takes more than one shot, then aim to
kill
.  Is that understood?”

Shane opened his mouth to say something, then apparently changed his mind and let it go with a nod.

“Now
hold on
a minute!” Mike objected.  “Shane’s only
sixteen
years old!  You can’t order him to shoot down two men just because they happen to be hiding under a bridge!”

Bud leveled his eyes at Mike.  “I told him to fire a
warning
shot,” he clarified.  “If they keep coming after that then they want something from us and they’re willing to chance a bullet to get it.  We don’t have the ammunition to play games with them.”

Rudy nodded.  “He’s right, Mike.”

“But he’s my
son
!” Mike cried, pleading with them even though a harder, stonier part of him knew they were right.  It asserted itself in the same calm, emotionless voice that told Keith Sturling he had been right to shoot two men dead at the 7-Eleven.

“We’re wasting time debating this,” Keith argued, pulling his service pistol from its holster.  “Let’s go find out what they want!”

Bud nodded.  “Someone go and get Larry and tell the women to get the kids down in the basement.”  His eyes wavered between Mike and Rudy, deciding which of them to send.

Mike made the choice for him.  “As long as Shane’s up there,” he said, pointing, “I’m
staying
.”

“I’ll go,” Rudy agreed, and without another word took off toward the Dawley’s, running fast and hard with his arms tucked at his sides and his head down, as if he’d been dropped from a helicopter into battle.

Up on the roof, Shane fired a shot.  It galvanized the group.

Mike and Keith had their pistols out, ready to move.  Bud’s shotgun and hunting rifle were across the street, leaning behind his front door.  He’d given his own service pistol to his wife.

“Spread out between houses,” he told the two younger men, using a hand signal he hadn’t used since leaving Viet Nam, where he’d led a platoon of men —
kids
, really — through the green side of Hell.  “I’ll cross Kennedy and try to circle around behind them.  Send Rudy my way if he comes back with Larry.”

Keith nodded and the three of them broke apart.

Shane fired three more rapid shots from the rooftop.

Somewhere behind the houses, a voice screamed angrily in pain.

The first skirmish for Quail Street had begun.

7

Shane glanced over his shoulder; saw Mr. Cheng running across his front lawn, and when he looked back through the rifle scope there were two men creeping out from the tangled shadows of the creek bed.  They looked like deer hunters, both dressed in camouflage and both toting rifles.

Shane aimed five steps ahead of them and put a steel-jacketed round into the weeds on the opposite bank.  The two men dropped out of sight, but didn’t retreat back to the concrete safety of the bridge.

“Go away,” Shane whispered, wishing them gone before he had to fire a second shot.  “Get out of here.”

Below the eaves, Mr. Iverson was talking to his father and Mr. Sturling, using a voice that sounded like it was coming from an old World War II movie.  Shane moved the scope slightly and looked back under the bridge.  A third man in olive camouflage was aiming a rifle at him.

Without thinking, he fired off three quick shots, using the tight pattern that always worked so well for him in video games.  The man fell back beneath the bridge, screaming in pain.

At the same time, the two deer hunters broke cover and ran toward the houses.

8

Bud heard the shots as he was hustling his 62-year-old ass across Quail Street and the jungle closed in on him again.  Thirty-six years evaporated in a heartbeat and he was back in the forsaken country, half a world away.

He reached his front door and the illusion shattered.  He found himself standing in the diffuse daylight of his tiled foyer, his car keys on a small table in front of him, his reflection gazing back from the flat depths of a mirror.  Nightmare and reality overlapping.

Move
, an inner voice urged and he broke eye contact with the illusion, reaching for his rifle.  He checked to see that it was loaded, a bullet in the breach, and ready to fire.  He thumbed off the safety on his way out the door.

Small arms fire erupted from the opposite side of the street, the combatants hidden somewhere behind the houses.

Bud swore and abandoned his plan to circle around the bridge, the time for surprise now flown.  He checked up and down Quail Street and saw Rudy crossing from the Dawley’s to the Hanna’s, his brand-new shotgun in hand.  In his haste he’d left the Dawley’s front door wide open.

Sloppy
, Bud thought to himself, frowning.  He made a straight line for it, the jungle stuttering back on him, coming and going in flashes, in green vines and palm fronds at the periphery of his vision.

A rifle sang out, hard and clear, and a patch of cedar shingles splintered off the shallow apex of the Sturling’s roof.  Mike Dawley’s son ducked down out of sight, no more than three feet from the blast, frantically shaking cartridges out of a Winchester box.

Bud hurried across the Dawley’s front lawn, feeling old and stiff, an easy target for anyone who happened to break through their defenses.

What defenses?
he asked himself, thinking they’d just gotten started with their hammers and nails, and a fat lot of good that plywood was doing them now.

He’d forgotten how quickly war could erupt from a clear blue sky, dealing out death with bloody red fingers. 
How was that possible? 
Thirty-six years in the suburbs and he’d forgotten that simple fact like an address or telephone number he no longer had any use for.

The soles of his Sunday loafers flapped on concrete and he stumbled through the Dawley’s front door, huffing and puffing as if he’d run an uphill mile instead of a flat 50 yards.  He slammed the door and twisted the deadbolt, taking little comfort in the reinforced oak.  Two men with rifles and an urgent sense of purpose would make quick work of the lock, and from the sporadic sound of gunfire out back, running along the banks of the creek, they were a long way from safety.

A pot of tomato soup was still simmering on the stove, Bud noticed, crossing to the sliding glass pane looking out on the back patio.  He stood to the side, his back against the wall, rifle at the ready, and surveyed the back yard before plunging into the fray.

The front line seemed to have fallen back toward the bridge, with Mike and Keith at a middle distance, their guns poised to take shots around a black walnut and a line of cedars in Keith’s back yard.

Bud slid the door quietly open and a man in green camouflage appeared, a gun at the ready, close enough to touch.  Bud realized that he knew the man: that he worked at the garage where he had his snow tires put on and taken off every year.  The gun cracked abruptly between them and suddenly Bud was back inside the Dawley’s dining room, sprawled across the table with a bullethole in his guts.

The man from the garage followed him inside, mud squeaking on his boots, mixing with Bud’s blood and leaving smeared prints on the caramel colored vinyl.  He raised his pistol so the barrel was pointed at Bud’s chest.

“Sorry about this, old timer,” he said gruffly, “but you’re better off this way.”

He pulled the trigger and Bud winked out like a blown candle.

9

Rudy heard the shot that killed Bud, but his ears didn’t differentiate it from the rest of the gunshots leading him to the west side of the street.

Larry had taken a long time to answer his door, and it had taken longer still to convince him to get his gun and leave the safety of his house; so long, in fact, that Rudy was a hair’s-breadth from seizing him by the shirtfront and hauling him screaming into the cul-de-sac, rifle or no rifle.  Larry didn’t want to leave his family, he didn’t want to leave his bomb shelter, though Rudy argued that if the invaders got a toe-hold in the neighborhood, it would only be a matter of time before they took it all, Larry’s house and family included.

Jan Hanna, who was crouched on the basement stairs with her two young sons, agreed with this assessment and Larry reluctantly picked up his rifle, following Rudy down the front steps just as Bud was taking his first bullet.  They crossed Quail Street with their heads down, moving at a fast crouch toward the narrow wedge of lawn that separated Rudy’s house from the Dawley’s.

They crept cautiously down the slope to the creek, ducking behind a fat blue spruce.

Quail Creek was not a daunting waterway; for most of the year, it was a pleasant stream of run-off from Hudson Pond; a murky green reservoir that waxed and waned with the seasons of the year.  At present, however, the creek was running in its banks as if it actually had somewhere to go.  They peered around the spruce, discovering they had an excellent vantage of two men crouched beneath the Quail Creek bridge.  A third man, dressed in sodden camouflage, lay face-down in the water a dozen or so steps away.

The men under the bridge didn’t seem to see them; they were shooting toward the houses and Mike and Keith were returning their fire, keeping them pinned down in the shadows.

Rudy laid a hand on Larry’s arm, motioning him down, out of sight.

“Can you hit one of them from here?” he asked, nodding at the target rifle.  “The shotgun isn’t going to do much good at this distance.”

Larry looked downstream.  Roughly 100 feet separated them, an easy distance for the heavy-barreled rifle, but Larry had never shot at a living target before.  Lines of doubt tugged at his face.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, lifting the stock to his shoulder and squinting through the scope.  This only made matters worse, for now he could clearly see the faces of the men he was supposed to kill.  He could count their gold fillings and the rings around their eyes.  He let the barrel dip and glanced at Rudy, his mouth trembling.  “I’ve never shot anyone before.”