The Last Days of October (6 page)

Amber awoke now on
the floor of the hall bathroom with her mind cloudy from dreams of Collin.
 
Her back ached in that particular way a body
complains when it doesn’t get enough sleep, partly because she’d slept on a bathroom
floor, partly because it was cold as hell in here with the heat off.
 
Miserly light wafted in from beneath the
door.
 
As her brain booted and loaded
memories from the night before, her waking confusion cleared and her perception
returned.

Crosses.

Everybody gone.

Vampire

She blinked,
rubbed her eyes and shook her head.
 
She
stood and tried the light switch.
 
When
that did nothing but click, she rested her forehead against the cold wall and
sighed.
 
Her breath came out in a worn,
ragged gust, but she didn’t cry; she’d done enough of that last night, her head
in Mom’s lap.
 
She’d cried enough to last
her a long time.

You are one fucked-up bitch.

Yeah.
 
Oh, yeah.
 
Collin’s voice there, speaking the truth as she knew it.
 
She’d shot her father three times in the
chest last night.
 
He’d gotten up.
 
He had fangs.
 
And yet she’d dreamed about her ex-boyfriend.
 
Not that other business, what was it…oh yeah,
the end of the world.
 
That she could
even think about a guy right now said horrible things about her mind and the
way it had chosen to organize her priorities.
 
Tara would have slapped her.

Tara’s dead,
the Collin in her head
said.
 
Like your dad.
 
Like me.
 
She walks with us.

She inhaled deeply
and opened the door.
 
In the hall,
daylight lit the second floor.
 
The glow in
the bedroom windows suggested she’d gone crazy, because none of the things in
her memory of the night before could have actually happened.
 
But as she stood in the hallway, nothing
challenged her awful feeling of sanity.

Because it is real,
she thought.
 
I can’t
wrap my mind around how it’s even remotely possible, but I’m living it.

“Mom?”
 
She called.
 
Hearing no answer, she felt her chest tightening before yet another
horrifying uncertainty: where was her mother?
 
She had hidden in the bathroom with Amber last night, after they left
Dad out there on the porch to do whatever it was vampires did when people told
them to fuck off.
 
But where was she now?

Did she go after him?

Amber stared
across the hall into her bedroom.
 
On the
table beside her bed, their last family picture stared back at her from its
silver frame.
 
She and Mom in simple,
formal dresses they never wore, Dad in his Navy blues.
 
The two of them standing behind her, each
with a hand on her shoulder.
 
Smiling.
 

She wouldn’t have done that,
Amber
thought.

She’s in love
, Collin retorted.

He’s a vampire.

She’s a girl.
 
Girls put up with all kinds of stupid shit
when they’re in love.
 
You ought to know.

Shut up.
 
Go stalk somebody.

She realized her lips
were moving then, like Mom’s did when she talked to herself.
 
It made her look crazy, and her face reddened
even though no one could see her.
 
She
descended the stairs.
 
In the kitchen, a
bag of Halloween candy sat open on the table.
 
The good stuff: Twix, Kit-Kats, M&Ms.
 
Amber breathed a sigh of relief.
 
No one, not even Mom, would stop for a snack
before running away with a vampire.
 

She grabbed a few
pieces for herself and stepped outside on the front porch.
 
A noise around the corner prompted her to
check the side of the house, where she found Mom closing the crawlspace
door.
 

“What are you
doing?” she asked.

Mom looked up,
startled.
 
Her hand shot up in a
stop
gesture when Amber swung her legs
over the railing and dropped to the ground.
 
“Don’t come over here.”
 

“Why?”

“Stay away from
the crawlspace,” Mom commanded.
 
“I don’t
want you going near it.”

Frowning, Amber
ignored her and walked half the depth of the house to where her mother stood
beside the squat little crawlspace door.
 
Mom stood beside the hose cart, with a brand-new hose neatly rolled into
a coil.
 
Amber blinked at it and felt a
sharp stab of pain in her abdomen; she had accompanied Dad to the hardware
store when he’d bought it.

“I told you not to
come over here,” Mom said.

Amber shrugged.
 
“What’s with the crawlspace?”

She reached for
the door, but Mom’s hand shot out and pushed hers away like a woman batting a
toddler away from a hot stove.
 
The
sleeve of her sweater retracted to reveal a bright white bandage over her inner
forearm.
 
Amber blinked at this.

“Do NOT open
that!” Mom barked.
 
“Do you understand
me?”

She blinked,
stunned by her mother’s tone.
 
And the
bandage.
 
Crossing her arms again, she
glanced at the door.

“He’s under
there,” she said.
 
A statement, not a
question.

Mom closed her
eyes and nodded.

A breeze blew down
between the houses but it was a gentle breeze from the sunny street, warmer
than the air presently surrounding them.
 
Still, Amber suddenly felt very, very cold.
 
She thought of the creature she had seen on
the porch last night.
 
It rested now
beneath the house.
 
She could see it
there, white skin dotted with flies, stinking and still, hands clasped over its
abdomen.
 
Staring at the floor joists
above it, sleeping with its eyes open.

Waiting for
sundown.

A moment passed
before she could speak.
 
When she did,
her voice felt gravelly, dry like the leaves beneath her feet.
 
“Anyone else or just him?”

“I don’t
know.
 
And we’re not going to find
out.
 
We’re going to stay away from this
door and forget all about it.”

“Are you going to
get a lock for it?”
 
Amber asked.

Mom stared at her.

“Why would I lock
it?”

“Because if you
don’t, he—
it—
is just going to get out
tonight and come banging on the door again.”

And honestly,
she didn’t add,
I don’t fully trust you to not let him in.

“And if I do,” Mom
replied, “he’ll be trapped in there.
 
And
eventually, he’ll starve.”

Amber thought of
the bandage.
 
Her eyes narrowed.
 
“What’s with the bandage on your arm?”

“Accident before
you got up.
 
I cut myself.”

“Accident?
 
Sure you’re not trying to feed him?”

Mom’s face twisted
into an indignant scowl.
 
“That’s
ridiculous!”

“Is it?”

Mom said
nothing.
 
For a moment they just stood
there, staring at each other.
 
Amber
noticed then the redness in Mom’s eyes and understood that she’d been crying.

Like
you
ought to be
, said a voice inside her.
 
He’s
your father, or was.
 
Don’t you
care?
 
Doesn’t this bother you at all?

She looked away,
closing her eyes and willing the voice away.
 
It did bother her, but not enough.
 
She tasted traces of chocolate in her mouth and realized that she had
woken up the morning after shooting her own father and had eaten candy.
 
Candy could still taste good and it could
still grab her interest because she didn’t really care about this, not in the
way she should have.
 
There had to be
something wrong with a soul that could see her father as a vampire, shoot him
and still pig out the next morning on junk.

Like I said
, pronounced the Collin in
her head,
you are one fucked-up bitch.

She threw a look
over her shoulder at the deserted street behind her.
 
Unmolested by passing cars, dead leaves
gathered freely on the blacktop.
 

Dead
, she thought.
 
Like
Dad.
 
They’re all dead and they’re all
laying there and that’s where they’ll rot.
 
Everything will rot.

“What do we do
now?” she asked, temporarily banishing such thoughts.
 
Another sign that something was wrong with
her; she should have been a wreck.
 

“I don’t know.”

“We can’t do ‘I
don’t know,’ Mom.
 
We have to have a
plan
, because if we don’t have a
plan
, we don’t…”

Mom interrupted
her.
 
“It’s the best I can do right now,”
she said.
 
“And I think what we really
need at the moment is…to think.
 
Think
about this.
 
Process it.
 
We need to do that before we make any
decisions.
 
So we don’t make a bad one.”

She paused again.

“And I think right
now I’m going to go to the store.
 
We’re
out of fuel for the camp stove, and we could probably use some other
things.
 
We’ll have breakfast when I come
back.
 
And then we’ll…I don’t know.
 
Talk.
 
Figure this out.”

“I’m coming with
you.”

“No,” Mom said
forcefully.
 
“I want you to stay here.”

“Why?”

“Because I need
some time alone, okay?
 
I’m having
trouble with this.”

So am I,
Amber thought.
 
But instead of saying it, she just shrugged
and nodded.
 
“Whatever.”

“I want you to
stay inside.
 
Don’t even come out on the
porch.
 
Not until I come back.”

She began walking
around to the front of the house and the porch stairs.
 
Amber followed her.
 
“And what if you don’t come back?
 
What if something gets you because you
decided to go out all by yourself?”

“Then don’t come
looking for me.”

8.

In one of
Heather’s happiest memories, she sat with Mike on Virginia Beach one summer
evening after work.
 
This had been before
Amber, before marriage, when they were both still in the Navy.
 
They had little money but no responsibility,
so when the week ended time belonged to them.
 
They sat on the shore with their bottoms in the sand and their legs
crossed beneath them.
 
What sun remained
shimmered in the dark band where the ocean soaked the sand and reached for the
shells, driftwood and seaweed it had deposited ashore at a higher tide.
 
Neither spoke.

She remembered
listening to the shells chattering beneath the rush of waves.
 
She watched the ocean roll forever in either
direction—cleaning the beach, smoothing it, renewing it.
 
The waning sunlight almost twinkled on the
fine edges of his chin, his cheekbones.
 
His features were gentle but strong, like him.
 
He had spent the last two years of his
minority on a farm in Morgan
County, and despite his
time on submarines his body still glowed from healthful work.
 
He could do things; he knew things, like how
to calm a horse and deliver a calf.
 
She
felt comfort in his commanding, capable presence.
 
Every memory of loneliness and unimportance
weakened in the salt air before it disappeared into the water.
 
She remembered thinking it remarkable how she
could feel so dark, so permanently alone, and then with the appearance of one
person suddenly not feel that way anymore.
 
How his presence could wash away the ruins of her past.

Now, years later,
she felt the weight of his loss curving her spine as she made her way to the
Durango, keys jangling in her hands.
 
The
self-inflicted cut on her arm ached like the memory of her last interaction with
Mike.
 
Conscious thought nearly
impossible.

But present
circumstances afforded her little room for grieving.
 
Amber was right; they needed a plan.
 
I don’t
know, we’ll talk about that later
would work for a while, but time had
become a precious currency in a world where reality bent at night.
 
They had to figure out what to do here.
 
They couldn’t be sitting clueless again when…

When he comes back.

Right.

The “check engine”
light on her dashboard lit up again when she started the Durango.
 
She considered abandoning the truck in favor
of a newer vehicle plucked from some neighbor’s driveway, but this would have
required her to enter their house to get the keys.
 
Houses had closets and rooms without windows.
 
Mike hadn’t remained in their home after his
turning, but she couldn’t be sure the same applied to her neighbors.
 
One of those things could jump her when she
tried to steal its car.
 
It could bite
her, drink her blood.
 

Turn her into one
of them.

Anyway, what was
it Mike always said about “check engine” lights?
 
Emissions control bullshit.
 
Wouldn’t even be worth fixing if it didn’t
have to pass inspection.
 
Worry about it
later.
 

Right
, she thought.
 
Later.

As she drove, her
left arm stung where she had cut it.
 
It
burned like a brand—proof of her insanity.
 
She had seen the crawlspace door slightly ajar this morning and realized
immediately where Mike spent his days.
 
And so, like any loving wife, she fed him.
 
She got a knife and a rag from the kitchen
and let the blood flow.
 
For a moment,
she thought she’d nicked a vein, she bled so much.
 
But then the little river slowed, then
stopped.
 
She threw the rag under the
house.
 
She heard something scraping
across the vapor barrier, and then she heard nothing.
 
The rag must have satisfied him.

She drove slowly
through town.
 
Jack-o’lanterns smiled
back at her from porches where no trick-or-treaters would tread this Halloween,
smiling because they couldn’t turn around and look at the houses behind them.
 
They couldn’t see the hideous black crosses
on the doors.
 
If they could do that,
they wouldn’t grin anymore.

The first order of
the day would be to locate other survivors, she thought.
 
And there would be some—there had to be.
 
If not here, then further down the highway in
Burlington, which was at least three times the size of Deep Creek.
 
Get on the interstate down there and make
their way to the army base at Fort
Bragg.
 
The army would have established a disaster
relief center, fortifications to keep people safe at night.
 
They’d have things under control.

And hell, for all
she knew this vampire business could be a purely local issue.
 
They could ride down the road and run into a
cordon of troops and military vehicles establishing a quarantine zone.
 
Heather didn’t want her and Amber to have to
stay
in a quarantine zone, but knowing
that one existed, knowing that the rest of the world hadn’t died along with the
citizens of Deep Creek, would have been a relief.

There’s no quarantine zone.
 
And this is not a local problem.
 
You know that.

“We don’t know
anything at this point,” Heather retorted aloud.

Yes, you do.
 
Look at the sky and think: when was the last time there was a disaster
and the skies weren’t buzzing with planes and helicopters?

She willed the
voice silent.

Revolution
Hardware downtown had a camping and outdoors section where she’d picked up
supplies for their trip back when everything was normal.
 
She remembered bottled water, racks of beef
jerky and canned food.
 
Water
purification tablets, solar chargers, rechargeable batteries.
 
Hurricane lanterns.
 
All things they would need.
 
She parked in a metered space in front of the
store and grabbed the Ruger from the seat beside her as she got out.
 
She was about to try the door when something
reflected in the glass storefront caught her eye.

Directly behind
her, the Morgan County Justice Building sat buffered from Third Street by a
short green lawn and a sidewalk.
 
A
walkway wide enough for two cars to pass each other led from the glass entrance
of the courthouse down to the street.
 
In
the center of the circle bulging at the midpoint of the walkway stood a
concrete monument, inscribed with the names of Morgan County’s war dead.
 
Benches sat on either side of the monument,
well-kept evergreen shrubs lining the sidewalks to keep pedestrians from
straying onto the grass.

And above the curb
dangled the first of six bodies hanging by their necks from lamp posts.
 
The first victim, slighter than the others,
swayed back and forth with the tips of his shoes drawing invisible circles in
the air.
 
At this distance, the near invisibility
of the hanging ropes made the bodies appear to float.

Oh my God.

In the picture
window, the image of an unremarkable woman in faded jeans and an Old Dominion
University sweatshirt
shimmered like a ghost over the wheelbarrows and rakes and leaf blowers visible
through the glass.
 
The translucent
figure blinked at her, her chest rising and falling with the slow rhythm of
Heather’s own breath.
 
She looked
clueless.

She let her gaze
float from the picture window to the City Center Drycleaners next door and
Frizzell Bail Bonds just beyond that.
 
Red-lettered “CLOSED” signs hung in the window of every door.
 
The wind that had set the bodies swaying
dragged stray leaves across the street and sidewalk, making dry sounds like a
hundred castanets.
 
A low creaking noise
joined the leaves, and it took her a moment to realize she was hearing the
ropes from the hangmen’s nooses rubbing against the metal streetlamps.

She drew the
pistol and walked slowly into the middle of the street.
 
She recognized none of the bodies swaying
from their ropes; their faces were purple, bug-eyed masks of strangled
pain.
 
Four men and two women, they hung
there like sides of meat in a butcher shop.
 
Which, at some point in the recent past, the courthouse district had
become.

She shivered and
turned back towards the hardware store.
 
She had thought she would have to break a window to get inside, but
someone else had pried open the door.
 
The broken lock rattled as she pulled it open and stepped inside of
Revolution Hardware.
 
The store smelled
as it always had, the pine-fresh scent of the lumber stacked in the back mixing
with the tang of insecticide and the earthy stink of the organic fertilizers in
bags up front.
 
The overhead lights were
dead, of course, but enough sun blazed through the storefront to illuminate
everything with the full light of day.
 
But for the silence, it could have been any other day.

But it wasn’t any
other day.
 
Behind the cash register, the
glass-fronted cabinets that had held hunting rifles and ammunition were smashed
and empty.
 
Someone had come in here and
cleaned them out.

Bet they’re out of spray paint and wooden
stakes, too
, she thought.

“Yeah, they
probably are.”

Heather screamed
and whirled around, drawing the Ruger from her waistband and aiming for the source
of the voice.
 
There in the doorway stood
Clyde, Mike’s friend.
 
Mike’s
only
friend, actually, that categorical
scarcity the only reason she put up with him coming over.
 
Mike needed friends.
 
And if the only friend he could find was a
little messy, a little drunk, a little
I’m-going-to-stare-at-your-wife-when-you’re-not-looking, then okay.
 
She could tolerate that.
 
For him.

But Clyde didn’t
look like a vampire, so this won him brownie points.
 
She relaxed and lowered the pistol.
 
“Jesus, Clyde, you scared the hell out of
me!”

“I can see that,”
he replied.
 
“Mind putting that thing
away?”

She stuck it back
in her waistband and studied him.
 
Even
several feet away he towered over her, with long, spindly arms and skinny legs
that recalled the branches of trees in winter.
 
Amber had referred to him as “The Mantis.”
 
He stood with a noticeable slump, a habit
perhaps born of a lifetime of being taller than everyone else.
 
His hair, once black but now shot through
with gray, poked out from beneath a Duke baseball cap.
 
The Mantis had survived the apocalypse.

“It’s nice to see
somebody,” she remarked.
 

He shoved his
hands in his pockets
 
and squeezed his
shoulders together, nodding.
 
He was so
narrow, she could have flipped him upside down and used him to break into
cars.
 
“Nice ain’t the word,” he
said.
 
“I about had a heart attack when I
saw you.
 
Where’s Amber?”

“Home,” she
said.
 
“We were camping.
 
We came back yesterday and everybody’s gone.”

“Welcome home,” he
said.
 
“Deep Shit Creek.”

She pursed her lips
and shrugged.
 

“You seen anybody
else?”
 
he asked.

“You’re the
first.”

“Well,
goddamn.”
 
He sighed and slumped even
further.
 
Clyde lived alone, she
remembered.
 
Mike said he had been
married three times, but none of these unions had produced children.
 
He spent his days collecting his military
pension and hanging out at the American Legion hall.
 
He had no one to mourn.
 
His life, she reflected, had been lonely even
before this happened.

“I was drunk off
my ass,” he said.

“Come again?”

“That’s how I made
it.
 
When those things came knocking, I
was passed out in my living room.
 
Folks
always said the drink would kill me, but it sure saved my shit this time.
 
Isn’t that something?”

“It is.”
 
She turned and looked at the rest of the
store.
 
Sunlight from the great glass
windows penetrated halfway down the building’s length, slacking and fading down
at the first break in the rows of neatly-shelved goods.
 
Then the shadows took over.
 
The camping section was in the back, of
course.
 
Everything she needed, back
there in the dark.