The Last Days of October (22 page)

28.

At dawn, the sun
rose with such a lack of energy that Justin half expected it to grab a toilet
bowl and barf up the remnants of the malt liquor and boxed wine it had consumed
the night before.
 
Amber didn’t awaken
when he opened the door to the cold morning, so he took the opportunity to step
behind the van and urinate on the side of the road.
 
It took him a while to get started—his
bladder kept thinking someone was going to come along at any moment and see his
junk dangling out of his zipper—but when he did it came in a great, satisfying
stream.

Amber was still
asleep when he climbed back inside.
 
He
briefly considered waking her, then decided against it; this would be her first
morning as an orphan.
 
The longer she
didn’t have to face that, the better.
 
So
he started the van and worked his way back to Highway 49, where he turned south
towards Deep Creek.
 
He didn’t want to go
back there, not really, but they would have to pass through town to get to the
interstate.
 
And there was no one there
anymore, he reminded himself.
 
He would
see nothing.

The ancient truck
that had quit on them approached on the left.
 
Ahead of it, an old farmhouse, ancient itself but obviously still
inhabited at some point in the recent past.
 
Justin noticed the drawn curtains as it flashed by and thought,
they’re in there
.

He shuddered.
 
But he kept driving.

Ten minutes later,
the Shell station appeared up ahead and Justin realized that he was
hungry.
 
He slowed and noticed for the
first time a shudder when the van downshifted.
 
Telltale signs of a failing transmission—at least this vehicle was
warning them.
 
He decided they would stop
at the house and get his truck.
 
Grab all
the gasoline they could siphon out of the neighbors’ rides and get back on the
road.

But first, chips
and beef jerky.
 
He pulled in beneath the
awning and switched off the ignition.
 
Amber changed positions and opened her eyes groggily, rising like the
sun before her.
 
She stared at him for a
moment before asking, “What are we doing?”

“Getting
breakfast.
 
We’re at the Shell
station.
 
You want some peanuts or
something?”

She shook her head
and closed her eyes again.

“You need to eat.”

No response.

Sighing, he exited
the van and walked across the blacktop and slowly entered the convenience
store.
 
The glass front admitted the
explosion of sunlight that had accompanied full morning, and everything in
reach of the window glowed gold.
 
Darkened drink coolers set in the back wall reminded him of Wal-Mart,
however, and so he stuck to the immediate vicinity of the cash register.
 
He grabbed a bag from behind the counter and
began filling it with tubes of peanuts and almonds, crackers and jerky.
 
Little Debbie snack cakes.
 
Good, healthy stuff.

If the vampires don’t get us,
he
thought,
this shit surely will.

He had to stifle a
crazy laugh.
 
It hit him then that after
all this time, he might be going just a little bit insane.

A car door thunked
shut outside.
 
He whirled around to see
Amber standing beneath the awning, hugging herself against a chill her thin
sweater apparently couldn’t keep out.
 
She took several steps and then stopped, frowning at something he
couldn’t see on the other side of the building.
 
Concerned, he stopped collecting processed junk food and walked
outside.
 
“What’s up?”
 
He asked.

“Look,” she
said.
 
“And listen.”

He followed her
pointing finger at the field beside the Shell station.
 
A wire fence enclosed yet another livestock
pasture—corn, tobacco, and leather-covered shit machines of one ilk or another
pretty much described it all in northern Morgan County—that
contained nothing but dried cow patties.
 
A huge barn, outbuildings and the obligatory farmhouse rounded out the
unremarkable scenery.
 
He heard nothing
but the scrape of the wind across pavement.

“Uh…okay,” he
said.
 
“I don’t hear anything.”

“You must be
deaf!”
 
With that, she took off at a
determined march across the gas station parking lot to the fence, which she
climbed with fluid grace.
 
Justin
followed, flummoxed.

“Mind telling me
what you’re doing?
 
That barn’s probably
chock-full of vampires, you know.
 
That
and the farmhouse.”

She dropped down
on the other side of the fence and waited for him with her hands on her hips.
 
“There were cows out here the other day, when
we came back from camping.
 
I remember
seeing them.
 
We came out of the store
and I saw them wandering all over this field.
 
Everybody had already turned by that point, but here were these
cows.
 
And now they’re gone.”

“A lot of things
are gone.
 
They probably ran into a
vampire that likes red meat.”

She deftly wove
her way among the piles of cattle dung as if guided by some advanced
shit-avoidance radar.
 
Justin didn’t have
this, and so he stayed close behind her.
 

And then she
stopped so suddenly that he nearly ran into her.
 
She turned to face him.
 
“Hear it now?
 
Listen.”

He did.
 
The wind died momentarily, just enough for
his iTunes-blasted ears to identify the unmistakeable sound of cows
mooing.
 

“They’re in that
barn,” Amber said.
 
“And they’re
alive.
 
Someone’s been tending them.”

29.

Dad had liked The
History Channel.
 
He hadn’t been one for
sports; while her friends’ fathers spent hours glued to the television during
football and basketball season, her own preferred to watch college professors
and white-haired ex-soldiers postgame wars that had ended decades and centuries
ago.
 
He especially liked World War Two
documentaries—even though everybody already knew how that one ended.
 
No suspense there at all.
 
Bo-ring.

“The Second World
War was the United States Navy’s war,” he once said proudly.
 
“Us and the Merchant Marine.
 
Your teachers will tell you that we sat
around over here until the end of 1941, but that whole deal in Europe would have been a totally different hooraw without
American naval power.
 
And the
Pacific?
 
Half this world would be
speaking Japanese without us.
 
The other
half would be speaking German.”

He talked to her
about these things as if she thought them as fascinating as he did; he reminded
her of the boys at school who would go off about last Sunday’s football game if
she made the mistake of asking them about their weekend.
 
Statistics, players, yardages delivered with
a wild-eyed enthusiasm that Amber found smacking of Asperger’s Syndrome.
 
She didn’t mind her father doing this—he was
talking to her, or at least talking
at
her—but his inability to see that she didn’t care about any of it astounded
her.

“Men like to know
things,” Mom explained.
 
“But it’s no fun
for them unless they can
show
you
that they know things.
 
Usually boring
things.”

He would watch his
boring things with the intensity of a sports fan, seated comfortably in his
recliner with a bag of popcorn and a bottle of beer.
 
She learned early on not to ask him anything
about what he was watching, because he would always tell her more than she
wanted to know.
 
One Sunday afternoon
during her freshman year of high school, though, she caught him in the living
room with his eyes riveted to the screen and his popcorn hardly touched.
 
He didn’t even fuss at her when she grabbed a
handful without asking.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said
back.
 
He didn’t look at her.

She looked at the
television.
 
This was a different war, a
later one with which she was unfamiliar.
 
Color footage, lots of CNN.
 
Dan
Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings—the newscasters of her childhood.
 
Africans with assault rifles and
bazookas.
 
“Where’s that?”
 
She asked.

“Somalia.
 
Before you were born.”

“What happened
there?”

“Sit down and
watch.
 
You’ll see.”

And so she
did.
 
As the clips and commentary played
out, she recognized the fact pattern from
Blackhawk
Down
, which she’d watched with Tara on DVD
at a sleepover last year.
 
Mildly
interested and desirous of avoiding the algebra homework waiting in her school
backpack, she sat on the couch and watched the whole thing with him, over half
an hour.
 
When it ended, she rose feeling
slightly more educated and proud that she and her father had done something
together—even if it didn’t involve talking.
 
She looked over at him and asked, “So how did all those warlords get in
power in the first place?”

“Somalia fell
apart.
 
A failed state.
 
The government, police, military, everything
basically dissolved and there was nothing but anarchy.
 
Hence the warlords.”

“But why did
anybody follow them?
 
I mean, obviously
it sucked and they weren’t making things any better.
 
Why did those people shoot each other over
some stupid popularity contest?
 
Sounds
like all these guys were a bunch of tools.
 
I wouldn’t have wanted any of them in charge of the yearbook committee,
much less my life.”

Dad took a drink
of beer, smiling smugly.
 
Her mother’s
words echoed in her ears:
Men like to
know things.
 
“Very simple,” he
said.
 
“Food.”

“Food and guns.”

“Guns to a certain
point, but mainly to the extent that they enable somebody to control access to
food.”
 
The knowledgeable smiled
grew.
 
“See, dictators rise to power when
they develop a monopoly on something that the people need.
 
In a functioning country, it might be
something like stability, strong leadership, national pride.
 
Back in the Middle Ages, it was access to
Heaven—you went against the Pope, he’d excommunicate your ass and you’d end up
in Hell forever and ever, amen.”

He shrugged.

“In Somalia, it was
food.
 
Those people couldn’t have given
less of a shit about nationalism.
 
They
just wanted to eat.
 
And guys like
Mohamed Farrah Aidid controlled what little there was.
 
The UN would send grain and rice and stuff
over there, and his gunmen would grab it.”

His eyes actually
twinkled.
 
Listening to him talk, Amber
got the funny feeling that he liked this story; that he found what Aidid did
somehow admirable.

“Genius, in a
way,” he continued.
 
“That was a guy who saw
an opportunity and went for it.
 
I mean,
you ever want power, Amber?
 
You ever
want to be Queen of the World?
 
Find
something that everybody needs, something there’s not enough of.
 
And control it.
 
Sons of bitches will fall in line to kiss
your ass all day long.
 
Just to get that
commodity.”

He smiled.

“Oil’s a nice one,
for this day and age.
 
But the best is
and always has been food.
 
Aidid and
these other ones lucked into a golden opportunity when Somalia fell
apart and people didn’t know where their chow was going to come from.
 
Because nothing takes a back seat to chow,
nothing.
 
Religion, nationalism, freedom,
nothing.
 
When people get hungry—I’m talking about
starving, not like you when you’re waiting for your fish sticks to come out of
the microwave—they’ll do anything to get full again.
 
You give them food, they’ll follow you
anywhere.
 
But you have to
keep
them hungry, feed them just enough
to where they don’t forget what it feels like to starve.
 
So they understand what’s going to happen if
they buck you.
 
So that they understand
this is
your
bus, that
you’re
driving it and that if they want
a ride, they better fall the fuck in.”

He laughed then,
an amused, self-satisfied sound.
 
It made
Amber’s insides squirm.
 

“These guys on my
boat all think, we’re so badass.
 
We’re
on an attack sub.
 
We can hide under the
water and blow shit up in Iraq
or Iran
or wherever we want.
 
Guys on the boomers
think,
we’re
so badass because we run
around with these nuclear weapons that no one’s ever going to use.
 
People think
that
is power.
 
Cruise
missles, ICBMs.
 
It’s not.
 
You want to know the most powerful weapon in
the world, Amber?”

He stared at her,
waiting for her answer.

“What’s
that?”
 
She asked.

“A bowl of rice,”
he answered.
 
“Chow.
 
You control that, you control everything.”

Bound for the
barn, she felt as single-minded and unstoppable as one of her father’s cruise
missiles.
 
She stared at the great doors
on their rollers.
 
Her legs followed the
boom of bawling cattle.

“Are you planning
on opening that thing up?”
 
Justin asked
from behind her.

“Yes.”

“If the farmer is
still alive, he might not appreciate this.
 
Why don’t we at least knock on the door of that house first?”

“What time is
it?”
 
She asked.

“Shit, I don’t
know…nine or something.
 
Why does that
matter right now?”

They reached the
corrugated metal doors and stopped.
 
Several strands of hair had escaped the confines of her ponytail and she
brushed them out of her face.
 
“Have you
ever heard of a farmer that screws around until nine and leaves his cattle in
the barn?
 
These people work sunup to
sundown.
 
Only farmer that would do
something like that is a dead one.”

“Why’s the city
girl suddenly an expert on animal husbandry?”

“Because my dad
spent his last couple years of foster care on a farm,” she replied.
 
“And he told me.
 
Help me out, here.”

“We’re fucked if
this is another vampire trick.
 
It’s
going to be game over all the way.”

“It’s not a
vampire trick and there’s no one in there.
 
Come on.”

She grabbed a
handle on one of the great roller-mounted doors while Justin seized the
other.
 
On a count of three, they pulled
in opposite directions and the doors slid open with an ease that seemed
incongruent with their size.
 
No sooner
had a gap appeared between the two than the first cow came charging out of the
interior and into the sun, bellowing.
 
It
headed for the pasture and the watering pond, followed close behind by another,
and another, and another.
 
A deluge of black,
white and brown animals poured out into the barnyard.
 
A young calf stumbled but kept up with the
rest of its herd—not a one of which charred or smoked.

Amber pressed
herself against the door to avoid the onslaught of trampling hooves.
 
As the stragglers lumbered by, she looked
over at Justin, who stared back with wide eyes.
 
When the last of the cattle ambled out into the morning, she peeled
herself off the door and stepped inside the barn.
 
Justin didn’t challenge her.

They found
themselves in one of two long feed alleys flanked by pens constructed from
steel tubing.
 
The metal building looked
the size of the gymnasium at her high school and maybe even larger, concrete
and hay beneath their feet instead of polished wood.
 
Up above, open ridge vents with their covers
propped open allowed the entry of morning air which, while pleasantly cool, did
little to dissipate the thick atmosphere redolent of dung, decomposing straw
and the stink of confined animals.

“Smells nice,”
Justin remarked.
 

“Someone’s been
feeding them,” Amber said.
 
“Someone’s
been getting them in here at night and letting them out in the morning.”

“You think maybe
the farmer got turned but maybe decided to stick around and tend his herd?”

Before she could
answer that, a weak bellow—more like a bleat, actually—from the far end of the
barn interrupted her thoughts.
 
Drawn by
the noise, she marched along the feed alley and the open pens to an enclosure
in the back corner where a single brown cow lay on a bed of straw with stripes
of golden sun from the ridges cast across its body.
 
Its labored breathing wheezed like some ancient
machine.
 
It stared at them as they
approached, but it didn’t get up.

“Careful,” Justin
warned.

“There’s sunlight
on it.”

“I know.
 
You start smelling grilling hamburger, back
the fuck up.”
 

But she didn’t smell
anything other than hay and dung, because this animal hadn’t turned.
 
It was sick, or perhaps getting ready to drop
a calf.
 
She knew nothing about cattle
but her inner six-year-old drove her to pet it, speak to it, offer whatever
comfort she could.

As soon as she
entered its stall, it began to bellow and kick.

Justin grabbed her
shoulders and pulled her back.
 
“It
doesn’t like you,” he said.

“Obviously.”

But the cow
demonstrated no such antipathy when Justin stepped around her and approached it
from the head, taking care to avoid the powerful hooves.
 
He laid a hand on its skull and stroked its
fur.
 
Its chest rose and fell rapidly in
tune with its breathing.
 
Amber shuffled
in as close as she could without pissing it off.
 
“What’s wrong with it?”
 
She asked.

“I don’t know,”
Justin replied.
 
“But I think it has
something to do with that shit over there.
 
Look.”