The Last Days of October (19 page)

“We’re leaving,”
she said.
 
“Today.”

22.

Back at the house,
Heather heard a thumping noise in the living room and looked down at the
carpeted floor.
 
It sounded like

He’s beating on the joists.
 
He knows what you have in mind and he’s
telling you you’d better not do that.

Now she paused on
her way out with another load of camping gear and clothing.
 
She stared at the sky, and then down at her
watch.
 
4:30.
 
How much sunlight did they have left?

Not enough.

“Should we just
stay put for the night?”
 
Amber
asked.
 
“It’s getting late.”

“I know,” Heather replied,
shoving her burden into the back of the Durango.
 
“That’s why we need to move faster.”

“The game’s
changing,” Justin said, pulling a cooler filled with God knew what.
 

“We made it in the
woods,” Heather said, “because none of these things knew we were there.
 
We need to get out of their range.
 
Out in the country, where there weren’t many
people to start with.
 
We go up there,
we’ll be just fine.”

“What if we’re not
just fine?
 
What if we end up in some
other vampires’ territory and they turn us?”

Heather had tucked
the Ruger into her waistband before loading the truck.
 
She felt it pressing now against her skin, a
hard metallic presence that spoke of things she preferred not to consider.
 

Count your rounds
, she had thought.
 
Make
sure you save at least three.

“That’s not going
to happen,” she said.
 
“Now come on, help
us.
 
We don’t have much time.”

They forgot some
things, Heather felt sure of it.
 
She had
never gone on vacation and not made at least one trip to the nearest
Wal-Mart.
 
This afternoon, she had
grabbed items as they flashed into her head, because they didn’t have time for
a list.
 
From the position of the sun,
she wasn’t sure they had time to do any of this at all.

“Got everything?”
she asked as Justin and Amber climbed into the truck.

“I think so,”
Amber said.

“Drive,” Justin
said.

She started the
engine.
 
When the idle settled, the Check
Engine light remained glowing, reminding her that something was rotten in
Denmark.
 
But the Durango protested not
at all when she dropped it into reverse and pulled out of the driveway.
 
The fuel gauge promised a half tank of gas,
more than enough to get them up the road to where they’d started all this—where
they had been, for a time, safe.

She blew through
stop signs and dead traffic lights without a thought and charged through
downtown like she was being chased.
 
The
city limits sign whipped by as she emerged into the county on Highway 49.
 
The turnoff to the high school flashed past,
and then the Shell station where they’d picked up their last load of
provisions.
 
She hit the open road and
increased her speed to eighty miles per hour, only slowing for the soft curves
where the road avoided one patch of land to traverse another.

To the west, the
sun continued its slow descent towards the tree line.
 
Shortly, the shadows would lengthen.
 
And the light would begin to fade.

I’ll stay up as long as I can,
the blood
orange in the sky said.
 
But even I can’t stop this rock from turning.

Just hang in there a little while longer,
she thought.
 
I just need to get up to that old house, clear the place, make sure
we’re the only creatures in there.
 
I
don’t need you to stay up all night, just another twenty minutes.
 
Twenty-five on the outside.
 
Can you do that for me?

She glanced at the
clock.
 
Knowing it was wrong, she pressed
down on the accelerator.

And the engine
started to miss.

“What’s
happening?”
 
Amber asked.

Heather stared at
the dashboard.
 
Temperature, battery, oil
pressure, all good.
 
The pesky CHECK
ENGINE light, the one that had been glowing for days now, stared back at her.

You stupid bitch,
it said.
 
Did you
think I was just whistling Dixie?

Yes.
 
She had thought it nothing more than some
silly emissions problem, nothing to worry about in a world where apparently
nobody else was driving much and she enjoyed slim chances of getting pulled
over when her inspection and registration expired.
 
Check engine, engine’s still there, right
under the hood where it needs to be, all good, okay, let’s go.

“You piece of
shit!” she growled.
 
“Do
not
do this!
 
No, no, NO!”

Fuck you,
the Durango said.
 
Feed me
cheap gas for ten years and IGNORE MY CHECK ENGINE LIGHT and expect us to be
all good?

The truck began to
jerk, as if some invisible, hateful idiot had crawled down on the floorboards
to play with the brake pedal.
 
The
tachometer needle did a crazy dance, jumped into the red zone and then crashed
to zero as the motor stalled out.

“You can’t do
this!”

But it could.
 
And it did.
 
With a metallic whine, it ground to a halt in the middle of the highway.

For a moment, no
one said anything.
 
They sat in the
truck, the silence broken only by the ticking of the Durango’s deceased motor
and the pounding of their own hearts.
 

Justin leaned
between the two front seats and said, “If you don’t get this thing started
again, we are ass-fucked.”

Amber looked over
at Heather, eyes wide.
 
Her face was that
of a scared child looking to her mother for answers.
 
Answers that the mother didn’t have,
decisions that the mother couldn’t make.
 
Important decisions.

Should I stay or should I go? Stay with the
vehicle or go seek shelter elsewhere?

She studied the
landscape around her.
 
By her reckoning,
they had stopped just over the Morgan-Caswell line, a good twenty miles from
where they needed to be.
 
Empty fields
lined the highway on either side.
 
On her
right, a dilapidated farmhouse stared at them with glassless windows.
 
Great holes in the roof exposed its rotting
frame and testified to the decades that had passed since the last human spent
the night there.
 
It wouldn’t serve their
needs for even temporary shelter; even if an army of vampires didn’t come
pouring in through the gaps where the windows had been, the whole works could
come crashing down on them during the night.

Up ahead, though,
she could make out the outlines of a squat but modernish brick ranch home.
 
Hopefully uninhabited.

That’s it,
she thought.
 
That’s
where we’ll go.

“Grab what you
can,” she said.
 
“Weapons, a little food,
whatever you’ll need just for tonight.
 
And make it fast.”

23.

The brick ranch stood
farther away than she’d estimated.
 
They
broke into a run at the end, only slowing when they reached the end of the long
gravel driveway that led from the road to a delta of gray rock marking the
beginnings of the front yard.
 
A set of
four depressions in the gravel before the garage suggested the recent presence
of an automobile that had since departed.

You better hope they departed,
she
thought grimly.
 
Because if they’re still in there, you’re in for a rough night.

“No cross on the
door,” Amber observed.
 
“That’s
encouraging, right?”

“Maybe,” Justin
said.
 
“Or maybe they were among the
first to get turned and never had a chance to go get the spray paint.
 
Do you think they’re home?”

“I’m about to find
out.” Heather handed the Ruger to Amber, who accepted it reluctantly.
 
Heather dropped her backpack and took one of
the sharpened broom handle stakes they had carried away from home.
 
“I’m going to clear this place,” she said.
 
“If you hear me yelling…”

“Run,” Amber said.

“Right.
 
But don’t go back to the truck.
 
See those woods?
 
Run that way.
 
Go through them if you can, find a place to hide.
 
Okay?”

They both nodded.

She kissed Amber
on the forehead and turned to face the front door.

The door wasn’t
locked.
 
This didn’t surprise her; out in
the country, many people didn’t lock their doors.
 
She’d had several friends in high school who
had never possessed keys to their own homes, since their parents never locked
them.

They had lived
without fear in those days.

She pushed the
door open with her foot and entered cautiously.
 
The front door opened into the living room, and she found herself
standing in a virtual carbon copy of her grandmother’s home in Wilmington.
 
Like that one, this had a kitchen located
right behind the living room and a hallway shooting off to one side, ostensibly
towards the bedrooms.
 
Hints of mothballs
riding on the cold and stagnant air reminded her of her grandmother’s house,
too.
 

Shadows lay
everywhere.
 
Dark spots stacked atop each
other to create pockets of night under tables, beside chairs and couches.
 
She looked through the living room and into
the kitchen, eyes lighting upon the door that probably led to the garage.

She cleared her
throat.
 
Her hands tightened on the
makeshift stake as she called out, “Hello?
 
Is anybody home?”
 

Nothing.
 

She moved in a
semicircle through the living room.
 
When
nothing flew at her from the bedrooms down the hall, she cleared them one by
one, gaining confidence as she went.

She ended in the
master, the largest province in this kingdom of shag carpet and floral
wallpaper.
 
Someone had assaulted the
twin dressers standing on the wall opposite the bed, and their drawers hung
partially open with clothes dangling over the sides like the tripe of a gutted
pig.
 
The bedroom spoke of a hasty departure.
 
Hopefully early enough in the day for the
owners to find a safe haven elsewhere.

On her way through
the living room, she heard a knock on the door.
 
Justin.
 

“Can we come
in?
 
It’s getting a little dark out
here.”

“One minute.
 
I haven’t checked the garage.”

A set of keys
dangled from a hook beside the door.
 
She
jumped back and to the side when she threw it open, but nothing emerged or
moved among the deep shadows in the garage.
 
She waited a moment, then stepped into the doorway with the broom handle
cocked above her shoulder like a spear.
 

A single window on
the far side illuminated an ancient pickup truck parked beside a lawnmower that
looked more expensive than Heather’s first car.
 
Gasoline and old motor oil mixed with grass clippings and the pungent
chemical aroma of lawn fertilizer.
 
For
all its age, the truck appeared obsessively shiny; this would be the owner’s
project truck, something he drove to auto shows on weekends.
 
She considered it for a moment, climbed
inside and stuck the key in the ignition.

The engine caught
immediately.
 
But the fuel gauge didn’t
move—either it didn’t work or the gas tank really was on empty.

She cut off the
motor and returned to the living room to open the front door.
 
Justin and Amber nearly knocked her over in
their haste to get inside.
 

“It’s clear,”
Heather said.
 
“Other than a few dust
mites, there’s nothing here.”

“Was that a car
starting?”
 
Justin asked.

“Old truck in the
garage.
 
It works, but I can’t tell how much
gas is in it and we really can’t risk being out there when it goes dry.”

Justin nodded in
understanding but said nothing.
 
He
locked the front door but stared at it for a long time, apparently lost in
thought.

“What?”
 
Amber asked.

“This isn’t our
house,” he said.
 
“I don’t know if we’ll
be able to keep them out tonight if they want in.”

Amber didn’t
respond.
 
Heather didn’t, either, and for
a moment the three of them just stood there in the steadily deepening darkness
of this strange living room.

“Doesn’t matter,”
she said with an authority she didn’t feel.
 
“They’re breaking rules left and right.
 
It was only a matter of time before they invaded our house.
 
Let’s just hope they don’t find us tonight.”