The Last Days of October (16 page)

“Your dad.
 
When does he typically show up?”

“I don’t
know.
 
We’ve only been here one
night.
 
Why?”

He shrugged and
looked down at the carpet.
 
“You’re going
to think I’m a total dork.”

“Okay…again, why?”

He took a deep
breath and looked up.

“I brought most of
my stuff in earlier, but I left my slippers in my truck.
 
My mom got them for me at Christmas a few years
ago, last time she ever remembered a holiday.
 
It’s the one useful thing she’s ever done for me.
 
They’re furry, they’re warm and I want them
on my feet.”

Amber stared at
him.
 
Then she laughed.
 
Moments ago, she wouldn’t have believed such
a thing possible, but the absurdity of it struck a chord in her she’d forgotten
existed.
 
And she was grateful.

His figure relaxed
somewhat and he picked himself up off of the wall.
 
When he stepped closer into the light, she
saw him grinning.
 
“It’s stupid, I know,”
he said.
 
“I was just, I don’t know…”

“Bored, maybe?”

“Yeah.
 
I mean, this beats the hell out of sitting
alone in my apartment, but once the sun starts going down there isn’t a whole
lot to do anymore, is there?”

“No, there’s not.”

He shoved his
hands in his pockets.
 
“Well, I think
I’ll make it through the night without my furry slippers, if you guys don’t
mind me wearing my sneakers in the house.
 
I’m going to go crash out on the couch.”

He turned to
leave, but he stopped when she spoke.

“You can hang out
here for a little bit, if you’d like.
 
If
you want to talk or something.”

He paused.
 
Then he said, “Sure.”

He pulled a chair
away from her desk and lowered himself into it.
 
They sat there in silence, he in the chair, she crosslegged on her
bed.
 
Then Amber asked, “Do you have
anybody that’s going to come to the door for you tonight?”

“My mom.
 
And my ex-girlfriend.
 
My only hope is that they haven’t figured out
where I am.”

Amber drew her
knees up under her chest and perched her chin between them.
 
“What was she like?”

“Who, my mom?”

“Your
ex-girlfriend,”
 
she said.

“Bitchy.
 
You don’t want to hear about Kayleigh.”

“Yes, I do.
 
Internet’s out and there’s no cable.
 
I totally have nothing better to do than to
pry into your personal life.”

He sighed and looked
up at the ceiling.

“Where to
start?
 
I met her in high school.
 
She ran off pretty much all my friends
because she had to have all my attention, and if I ever didn’t text her back
in, like, half an hour she’d blow up my phone wanting to know where I was.
 
And once all my friends were gone, I didn’t
have anybody.
 
I had all this shit going
on in my life and only one person to talk to about it.
 
Her.”

“Why’d you break
up?”

“Because when my
dad got cancer, he ended up in the hospital for several weeks before he finally
gave out.
 
Kayleigh gave me a ration of
shit about spending so much time over there and leaving her by herself.
 
I was like, are you serious?
 
Are you seriously giving me a hard time about
visiting my dying dad in the hospital because you’re lonely?
 
I dumped her ass.”

Shadows covered
half his face.
 
Nascent moonlight
illuminated the other half.
 
He grinned,
but it was a pinched, sarcastic look.
 
She tasted the bitterness in his words.

“What’s crazy is,
I kept talking to her.
 
I was actually
over at her trailer the day the shit hit the fan around here.
 
That’s why I was in jail.
 
She got mad at me and took a warrant.
 
And even after that, she comes to my door and
I’m like, should I just let her in?
 
Just
open the door and be done with it?
 
It
makes no sense.”

She looked out the
window that consumed most of the back wall.
 
The purple sky glowed behind black, naked trees, branches interlaced
beyond the glass like some sort of twisted ribcage.
 
Then she said, “I’m worried about my mom.”

He sat in the
chair, listening.

“She opened the
door last night.
 
She would have let him
in, too.
 
Had I not been there she’d have
let him suck her dry.
 
She’ll deny it, but
I swear to God that’s what she was about to do.”

“Are you worried
she’ll let him in tonight?”

“No, but…well,
maybe.
 
I’m worried that she’s not
thinking straight when it comes to him.”

He let his eyes
fall to the carpet and nodded slowly.
 
“I’ve been thinking about your dad, too,” he said.
 
“Your mom said there were others.
 
A bunch of them.
 
Out on the street.”

“I saw them.
 
Out in the yard.”

“But none of them
on the porch.
 
He was the only one to
come up on the porch and knock on the door.”

“Right.”

He straightened
up.
 
His lips were a thin line across the
bottom of his face.
 
“And all night, none
of these bastards did a thing.
 
Nobody
knocked on a window.
 
Nobody came up on
the porch.”

“No.
 
Is this important?”

“It is,” he said,
“if you think about what you saw in Wal-Mart.
 
Those things were like animals closing in on a kill.
 
But they didn’t finish.
 
They stayed back.
 
They left you alone.”

“Only because
you
jumped in there with that portable
spotlight and saved us.
 
Otherwise, we’d
have been…”

“A battery-powered
spotlight,” he said.
 
“Electric.
 
A glorified, magnified light bulb.”

“So?”

He leaned
forward.
 
“These fucking things aren’t
afraid of electric light.
 
I’ve seen it;
the jail stays lit up like daytime all night long.
 
I had one standing right out in front of my
cell, right underneath a light bar.
 
Why’d the spotlight work, Amber?
 
Why are you still here?”

She blinked.
 
She had no idea.

“Because you’re
his
,” Justin said.
 
“You’re his daughter and your mom is his
wife.
 
You’re still here because he’s got
dibs on you guys.
 
Me, I got lucky.
 
Had I gone in there with different girls, I’d
still be in that store.
 
You know it.”

She sucked in a
chestful of air and held it for several moments.
 
He had to be right.
 
If they reacted to electric light the same
way as sunlight, they should have all fried in the jail immediately after their
turning.
 
But when she opened her mouth
to say this, she said, “You’re wrong.”

“About what part?”

“It’s her,” Amber
said.
 
“It’s her, and it’s always been
about her.
 
He could care less about
me.
 
Did you know that he never asked to
speak to me when he was deployed?
 
We
would get these calls from Italy
or Spain
or wherever his ship docked and I would hear Mom ask him, ‘Do you want to talk
to Amber?’
 
She’d say this when it was
clear their conversation was winding down, and then she’d hand me the phone and
say, ‘Your dad wants to talk to you.’
 
I
was like, no, he doesn’t.
 
You asked him
if he wanted to talk to me and he said yes.
 
He
 
didn’t ask.
 
Because he doesn’t care.
 
Because
he doesn’t think about me.
 
I’m just an
accessory.
 
I have no memories of him
ever doing anything where it was just me and him and not my mom, too.
 
He never took me to a movie or showed me how
to fish or how to do this or how to do that, and he didn’t do any of these
things because
he didn’t give a shit
.
 
To him, I was just…there.”

And suddenly she
was crying.
 
Justin rose and sat down
beside her on the bed.
 
He put an arm
around her and held her as she shook.
 
“You know what I think?” she asked.
 
“I think I was just a boat anchor to him.
 
Something he could hang around her neck to
keep her in place so that he could be an ass and control her and do whatever
and she wouldn’t leave him.
 
Because he’s
obsessed.
 
Kids are great to keep women
in their place.
 
Get a girl pregnant and
in a sense, she’s yours for life.”

He held her until
she stopped shaking, then sat with his hands in his lap when she rose and
grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her desk.
 
She wiped her nose and discarded the used
tissues in the trash can by her chair.
 
Justin studied her thoughtfully.

“What?”
 
She asked.

“It does make
sense,” he said.
 
“That he was
obsessed.
 
And that we’re still alive.”

She folded her
arms.
 
“How so?”

“This town had thousands
of people in it before this happened.
 
Now it has three.
 
And it’s safe
to assume that everybody else, with few exceptions, has been turned into a
vampire.
 
Vampires suck blood.
 
It’s how they live.
 
So not only are there no people, but there
are no dogs or cats, either.
 
Which begs
the question: now that everyone but us has turned, what are these things
eating?”

Amber
blinked.
 
She hadn’t thought about that.

“And the answer to
that is,” Justin continued, “not much.
 
They sucked the blood out of all the meat in Wal-Mart, and you saw those
things—they were skinnier than the extras in a Holocaust movie.
 
They pulled that shit with the lights and the
generator because they want to attract victims, because they’re hungry as hell
and the pickings have gotten pretty slim around here.
 
And yet, here we are.
 
They had you and your mom surrounded, but
they didn’t take you.
 
Not because of
some goofy dude with a big flashlight, but because
you belong to somebody else.
 
Somebody important.
 
You’ve got
his brand on you somehow.”

Brand.
 
He’d used the word
brand
—like
they were cattle.
 
Property.

“Which, if you’re
starving, shouldn’t matter.”
 
He nodded,
agreeing with his own assessment.
 
“Think
of the hungriest you’ve ever been and multiply it to the point where you are
acutely aware that your survival depends on you eating something very
soon.
 
Picture somebody bringing you a
plate with a couple of grilled steaks on it.
 
Now picture yourself
not
eating it.
 
How does that work?
 
How
can
it work?”

“I don’t know.”

His eyebrows
raised.
 
“If you know that those steaks not
only belong to somebody else, but they belong to somebody very important.
 
Somebody who will totally fuck you up if you
eat them, and your fear over what they’re going to do to you is strong enough
to overcome starvation.”

He watched her as
she processed all this.
 
The silence
between them crackled with the implications of what he was saying.

“He’s somebody
important,” she said.
 
“Very important.”

“Yes,” Justin
said.
 
“He’s got dibs on your mom, and
he’s got to be the one to take her.
 
Because she belongs to him.
 
Maybe
you too, but she definitely belongs to him.
 
And the others have left you guys alone so far because he’s
special.
 
Because he’s their leader.”

19.

Heather had gone
out drinking.
 
She and three other girls
from her unit hit the bars on liberty in Virginia Beach, gaining easy entry
despite none of them having ID.
 
The law
hadn’t treated underage drinking as harshly back then as it did now; a girl
could still find a good time in those days.
 
Especially a girl out of uniform, in tight jeans and a tank top that
revealed the contours of her pre-Amber body.
 
Before all the years wore her down.
 

They drank for
free.
 
Riding a buzz financed by the
hopes of horny sailors and college boys, they ended up on the beach with a trio
of sailors from some aircraft carrier
.
 
Her friends hooked up; she didn’t.
 
I’m married, she told them.
 
My husband’s at sea.
 
They respected that, and nobody gave her a
hard time.
 
She made it through the night
with her liver a little worse for wear but her moral fiber intact.

And that should
have been the end of the memory; a fun night out on the town, something she
would have done every weekend had she gone to college.
 
It should have been the kind of memory that
took the edge off of the choices life had presented to her as it denied her
those it provided others.
 
Should have
made her smile.
 
But it didn’t, because
someone had seen them.
 
And told Mike.
 
And even though three weeks passed before
Mike returned to port, he found out about it.
 
Under the ocean for two solid months, and he had still found out about
it.

And he slapped
her.

In the midst of a
colossal fight she didn’t quite understand, he reached out and popped her in
the face.
 
She made it through
I didn’t do anything wrong
and
who the hell are you to…
and then POW,
out came the hand.
 
She reeled from the
impact.

“
I go to sea,” he growled.
 
He wanted to shout, she knew, but he couldn’t
shout. Not in those little apartments crammed so closely together.
 
They’d already had complaints.
 
“I go to sea, I risk my life and what do you
do?
 
Huh?
 
You go out to the Lido Inn?
 
A
married woman going to bars like some kind of coke whore?”

“I didn’t do
anything,” she protested again.
 
Her left
cheek stung where his right palm had smacked it.
 
He’d never done this before, struck her
physically.
 
It had been a surprise
assault, but she had seen his hand coming; she could have grabbed it, twisted
it and spun him around like she’d done to scores of drunken sailors.
 
But she’d done nothing.
 
She’d just let him.

“DON’T YOU LIE TO
ME!”

His scream came in
a hurricane force that propelled her back against the wall of their little
kitchen.
 
The calendar where she’d been
marking the days to his return fell to the floor.
 
In one swift motion, he raised his fist and
punched straight through the cheap drywall next to her head.
 
Her breath, her heart, everything
stopped.
 
She stood there, frozen, and
waited for him to pull his fist out of the wall and put it through her face.

“Don’t you lie to
me,” he repeated.
 
His voice was lower
now, but he spoke in a tone like battery acid.
 
“I already know.
 
You and those
sluts took a bunch of yahoos out on the beach for…what?
 
Conversation and fellowship?”

She drew in only
enough breath to power her vocal chords.
 
“I…didn’t!”

“And why should I
believe you?
 
Because you’re so
trustworthy?
 
Because you took a bunch of
guys out on the beach after getting shitfaced hammered at that fleabag bar, but
oh, no, you didn’t fuck anybody?”

Less than an inch
separated their noses.
 
She felt him in
her head.

“You know what?
 
I do believe you.
 
I know you didn’t do any of that nasty shit,
because you
can’t
lie to me.
 
Because no matter what you say I will
always
know the truth.
 
Because you’re a shitty liar.”

He stepped back
and pulled his fist out of the wall.
 
He
retreated into the bathroom alone, where he remained.
 
In the two hours that followed, Heather
struggled with the decision of how to spend the rest of her life.
 
She had an opportunity, she realized, to
leave.
 
Were she ever to escape his
gravitational field, her rockets would never be stronger than right now.
 
He’d done something not only wrong, but
bad
, very bad; he would understand this,
and when he came out of that bathroom to find her gone not only from the house
but also his life, he would get it.

More to the point,
she
understood what he’d done.
 
She had watched this scene before, aboard
base in quarters just like these.
 
She
had worked enough nights and weekends.
 
She’d seen the bloody noses and blackening eyes; she’d seen the heads
tilted forward or to the side, bent with the weight of believing they could
achieve nothing better.
 
Some of them
were probably right.

All she had to do
was pack a suitcase.
 
Yet when Mike
emerged from the bathroom, she hadn’t left.
 
He stared at her from the doorway for a while, looking tired and
ashamed.

“I’m sorry,” he
said at last.

“You should be,”
she said.

“I’m not going to
hit you again,” he said.
 
“Ever.”

“And if you do,
I’ll leave you.”

He nodded.
 
He shuffled over to the couch and sat down on
the other end.
 
His bandaged right hand
looked like a Q-tip in his lap.
 
“Fair
enough,” he said.
 
“Are we all good now?”

He had slapped
her.
 
Punched a hole in the wall.
 
And he wasn’t even drunk.
 
“Yeah,” she said.
 
“Of course we are.”

She lay on the
couch now, the Ruger at the ready on the coffee table beside her.
 
She understood that it wouldn’t save her if
Mike’s new friends gained entry to the house, but it made her feel better and
so she kept it nearby.
 
Upstairs, Amber
was silent—exhausted, probably dead asleep.
 
Justin had occupied the couch, but Heather had kicked him out and sent
him upstairs into the guest room.
 
Alone
now, she lay on her side and stared at the dead eye of the television set.
 
She would have given her left arm for a glass
of red wine and some
Friends
reruns just
now.
 
Something to take her mind off of
all this.
 

A sudden noise
outside made her sit up.
 
Boards creaking
on the porch.
 
Full dark out there now,
there could be only one person who would be doing that.

Knock…knock…knock.

Instinctively, she
grabbed the Ruger.
 
With her free hand,
she reached forward and pulled the blind slats apart enough to where she could
see outside.

October wind
blowing down the street disturbed the leaves on the ground and ripped stubborn
hangers-on from the skinny branches to which they clung with such
tenacity.
 
The vivid autumn palette of
gold and orange and bronze had spoiled with the disappearance of the sun, and
now the color receptors in her eyes detected nothing but different shades of
gray.
 
And among these shades stood a
dozen or more dark, skinny figures.
  
Standing still, like ice sculptures.
 
Waiting for something.

Orders,
she thought.
 
These
are his.
 
These are his troops.

That heavy, wooden
sound again.

“Heather.
 
Let me in.”

Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin
,
she thought wildly, almost breaking out in a gale of insane laughter.
 
She rose from the couch, clutching the
pistol, and approached the door in the foyer.
 
The knocking stopped when she laid a hand on the wood.

“You’re not coming
in,” she said.

Mike took his time
responding.
 
She had thought her blood
couldn’t run any colder, but when he spoke again she understood that this
belief, like all the others, had all the strength of dry toast.

“You’re mine,” he
said.
 
“You belong to me.”

“No,” she
said.
 
“I belong to
me.
”

“You took a
vow.
 
I own you.
 
And I always will.
 
Maybe you could have left in the beginning,
but it’s really too late now.
 
Without me
you have nothing, you
are
nothing.
 
You cannot exist on your own.”

Her hands
clenched.
 
She reminded herself that this
wasn’t Mike at all; this was some wicked creature from the basement of Hell
that had broken in and found his dirty laundry.
 

It didn’t make her
feel any better.

“Did you enjoy
your trip to Wal-Mart today?” he asked.

Her blood
froze.
 
For a moment, she quit breathing.

The creature
seemed to sense her discomfort, because he laughed.
 
The sound was dead and mummified,
hideous.
 
“That was stupid.
 
Exactly the kind of boneheaded,
shit-for-brains mistake you would make.
 
You didn’t think you got out of there on your own, did you?
 
That Sir Galahad saved the day with his
flashlight?”

She had thought
exactly that.

“You continue to
exist as you are because it is my wish,” the vampire hissed.
 
“Because, as always, I’m protecting you.”

“No,” she said.
 
“You’re not.”

“Yes.
 
Look outside.”

Heather didn’t
move.
 
She remained rooted to the same
spot in the foyer, staring at the dark door that seemed to be talking to
her.
 

“Go on,” it
said.
 
“Go in the front room and look
through the window.
 
I’ll stay here.”

She freed her feet
from the floor and plodded slowly into the living room.
 
She drew back the curtain and peered through
the glass.

A platoon of dark
figures stood in formation on the sidewalk in front of her house.
 
They appeared to be standing at parade
rest.
 
The dark obscured their faces, but
she didn’t need to see them.
 
She knew
what they looked like.

They’re his.
 
They’re all his.

She returned to
the foyer.

“They’re hungry,”
the thing said from the other side of the door.
 
“We all are.
 
But here we have
discipline.
 
We have rules.
 
We have this because I have imposed it.
 
But remove yourself from my protection,
Heather, and there will be no rules.
 
Burn me, stake me,
lie to
me
and those rules will change.”

“What do you
want?” she asked.
 
She meant it as an
honest question, but it came out as a cry.
 
“Why are you doing this?”

“I want you,” it
said through the door.

“You can’t have
me!
 
You’re dead!
 
I’m not!”

“Join me.
 
Be with me.”

“No!” she
cried.
 
“You’re not my husband!
 
Do you hear me?
 
Do you get that?
 
Go away!”

“Give yourself to
me and I’ll let them go.
 
Both of them.
 
It’s you that I want.
 
This is my offer to you.
 
Give yourself to me and they may live.”

“We’re out of here
come morning.
 
We’re going to leave and
go somewhere you’ll never find us.”

“If I believed
that,” he said, “I would come through this door right now and I would take
you.”

“You
can’t
,” Heather said.
 
“You can’t come in unless I invite you!”

“Is that so?”
 
It asked.
 
“Is that because of this cross on the door?
 
Or is it because those are just the rules,
that vampires must be invited in?
 
Or…”

It paused, letting
its words sink in.

“…is it because
I
have forbidden my troops from taking
you?”

No.
 
No, that can’t be.

“It’s an
interesting question,” he said.
 
“You think
about that.
 
But don’t think about
leaving Deep Creek.”