The Last Days of October (8 page)

10.

Outside, the sun
poured the light of science and rationality upon downtown Deep Creek.
 
Barely a hundred feet away, the bodies
swung.
  
Ropes creaked beneath their
weight.

Take care
, they said.
 
Vampires
aren’t your only enemies.

True, Heather
realized.
 
Cheap bread couldn’t have gone
stale as quickly as the remains of modern society had disintegrated.
 
If she and her child were to survive this,
she would need to reevaluate her plan.
 
A
lot of road lay between Deep Creek and the army base at Fort Bragg;
they couldn’t count on every live person they met along the way being
helpful.
 
With the police gone and the
courthouses deserted, the rule of law existed only in the memories of
survivors.
 
Without its protection, the
strong and numerous could simply take what they wanted.

“We need to stay
put,” she whispered.
 
“Ride this
out.
 
Let help come to us.”

And what if help doesn’t come?
 
The bodies asked.
 
What if there is no army
anymore and the next people you meet are armed marauding freaks a la
Mad
Max Beyond Thunderdome
who decide to make
a little harem out of you and your daughter?

“Then I’m going to
kill a lot of fucking people,” she growled to the silent air.

And before the air
could answer, a voice behind her asked, “Who’re you going to kill?”

She jumped.
 
The boy standing in the street behind Heather
looked about Amber’s age but could have been even younger.
 
His wispy blond hair rose and fell in a
breeze that kept the bodies behind her swaying from their creaking ropes.
 
He glanced up at them momentarily before
looking back at her, a white Chevrolet pickup truck idling quietly behind him.

She removed the
pistol from her waistband and pointed it at him.
 
She wouldn’t let her guard down twice, boy or
not.
 
He raised his hands.

“Easy,” he said.

“Stay over there.”

“Okay.
 
No problem.
 
I can do that.
 
Just don’t shoot
me, okay?”

“What are you
doing here?” she asked.

“I came to cut
them down,” he said, gesturing with his head at the bodies.
 
“I got a ladder in the back of my truck.
 
I was going to climb it and cut them down.
 
Cover them up.
 
There’s a tarp under the ladder.
 
Go ahead and look.”

Hands held up, he
backed away and to the side as Heather approached the truck.
 
She threw a glance into the bed.

A ladder.
 
A tarpaulin.
 
A toolbox.

“Look, lady,” he
said, “I get it, okay?
 
I totally
understand why you’d be a little, I don’t know, paranoid.
 
It’s all good.
 
But seriously, I just came here to cut these
folks down so I don’t have to see crows pecking at their frigging eyes every
time I drive by.”

“You have
something to do with this?”

“
No
,” he said with an emphatic shake of
the head.
 
“I just want to cut them
down.
 
It’s the right thing to do.”

He squinted at
her.
 
“What happened to your face?”

She reached up
with her left hand and felt her cheek.
 
It felt raw, tender.
 
“How does it
look?”

“You got a bruise
coming up.”

“You should see
the other guy.”

His eyes fell to
the pistol in her right hand, which she still hadn’t lowered.

“Man bring his
fists to a gunfight?”

“Something like
that.”

He bit his lower
lip and breathed slowly.
 
“He deserve
it?”

“He did.”

“Okay, then.”

They stood for
several long moments, the boy with his hands in the air, Heather with the
pistol pointed straight at him.
 
He
didn’t try to move.

“Can I put my
hands down?” he asked finally.

“Why’d you sneak
up on me?”

“Why did I drive
up behind you in a pickup truck, get out and stand here while you ignored
me?
 
I don’t know.
 
I guess I thought you were frigging
deaf.
 
You were acting like it.
 
Until you started talking to yourself.”

He looked up at
the bodies.
 
Then he looked back down at
her.

“I’m putting my
hands down,” he said.
 
“You can shoot me
or whatever.
 
But my arms are getting
tired.”

He allowed his
hands to fall.
 
He wore jeans and a baggy
hooded sweatshirt, but if he had any weapons concealed he didn’t reach for
them.
 
Heather kept the gun on him.

“Why don’t you
just go on?” he asked.
 
“Go back to your
car, wherever that is, take off, let me do my thing.
 
How does that sound?”

It sounded
logical, and had she an ounce of sense she’d have done just that.
 
But for some reason, she didn’t want to leave
the boy.
 

“My husband will
be coming along any minute.
 
He’s in the
Navy.
 
He’s a SEAL.
 
Special forces.”

“I know what the
SEALs are,” he said.

“I was in the
Navy, too.
 
Shore Patrol.
 
I’m trained in armed and unarmed combat.”

“Good for
you.
 
For real, can you go on and take
that gun with you?”

She sighed and
lowered it.
 
Then she stuck it in her
waistband.
 
He looked down at it but
didn’t move from where he stood.

“I’m Heather
Palmer,” she said.

“I’m Justin
Lesner.
 
Are you from here, or are
you—and your husband—passing through?”

“I guess I’m from
here,” she said.
 
“Now, anyway.
 
But I wasn’t here until yesterday afternoon.”

He perked up.
 
“Where were you?”

“Camping.”

“Like, in a
tent?
 
Out in the woods?”

“Yes.
 
In a tent.
 
Out in the woods.”

He whistled and
shook his head.
 
“Wow,” he said.

“I know.”

“I mean,
wow.
 
You have no idea how lucky you are.
 
Seriously, you can’t be outside at night.
 
At all.
 
I can’t believe you’re standing here talking to me.
 
You should be under a house somewhere.”

She thought about
all the nights she and Amber had sat outside the tent, hugging their knees and
watching the fire.
 
Out in the open.

“Where’s your
family?” she asked.

Justin
deflated.
 
He sighed and shook his
head.
 
“Ain’t got one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s
not…doesn’t have anything to do with all this mess.
 
I was on my own even before this.
 
My dad died of cancer last year.
 
My mom is…was…”

Justin trailed off
and looked up the street.
 
Heather got
the sense that he was looking at something far, far away.

“…wherever,” he
finished.
 
“She had issues.
 
Had a couple kids other than me, but the
state took them away.
 
My dad raised me.”
 
He shrugged and looked back at her.
 
He had pleasant green eyes.
 
“Far as I’m concerned, she’s been dead even
longer than him.
 
So I got nobody.
 
Which is kind of nice, right, because it
means I didn’t lose anybody.
 
Know what
I’m saying?”

“I do,” she
said.
 
She studied his face, cocking her
head to one side, returning his expectant stare.
 
When he said nothing else, she asked,
“Justin, can you tell me what happened here?”

“Sure,” he
said.
 
“But can you help me with
something first?”

“What?”

“Help me cut these
bodies down and get a tarp over them.
 
They bug me.”

11.

Back when Justin cared
about such things, Kayleigh had found a way to screw him with her pants up,
clothes on and him no where near her couch or bedroom.
 
She engineered this after he left her
trailer—
ran
 
from her trailer—when the conversation went
south.
 
On his end, the situation
degenerated rapidly when she said:

I’M
PREGNANT.

On her end, it
happened when in response to that, Justin said:

BULL-
SHIT
!

And then followed
up with every girl’s favorite:

IT
AIN’T MINE!

Oooh.
 
Not good, not the way to handle that, no
sir.
 
Even if it was true; even if she
couldn’t be pregnant by him because he’d always used condoms on the expectation
that this day
would
come—this day
when she would utilize the nuclear option in her attempts to keep him from ever
leaving her.
 
He’d seen it coming.
 
And so he bagged it.
 
Always.
 
And none had ever broken—a blue-eyed miracle, considering his size.
 
Not that he knew much about other dicks or
anything, but Kayleigh had commented on it.
 
And
she
knew a lot about
dicks.

“I can’t believe you
said that shit to me,” she said, eyes narrowing.
 
Speaking of blue-eyed miracles, Kayleigh had
gotten her hands on some of those funky contacts and now
she
was a blue-eyed miracle, kind of a wild effect in concert with
her reddish hair.
 
Looking down at her
that evening, he’d felt like he was banging one of those spice junkies from
Dune
.
 

“What am I
supposed to say?
 
It’s true.”

“Them things ain’t
a hundred percent effective.
 
Even says
so on the box.”

“They are if you
put them on your wang
before
you start
fucking.
 
So if you
are
pregnant, one more time: it ain’t mine.
 
I don’t know what you want me to say.
 
And, I mean, if you were wanting me to be all
like, oh shit, oh fuck, I guess we have to get back together, I’m not going to
say that.
 
That is one hell of a bad
idea, and you know it just as well as I do.”

Red lightning
flashed behind her contacts.
 
Her jaw
hardened and her features seemed to lose all their softness.
 
Justin saw the funnel cloud gathering
strength.
 
He knew the look; he’d made
her angry.
 
The list of things that made
Kayleigh angry ran longer than her dad’s rap sheet, but she
really
didn’t like it, never had, when
Justin stood up.
 
When he failed to abide
the ride and go with the flow, no matter how twisted, illogical and downright disastrous
that flow might be.

“
Why’d you come over here?
 
Huh?
 
Why did you come over when I texted you?
 
You come over just to get laid?
 
Were you like, I’m gonna go over there and fuck Kayleigh one more time
and then I’m gonna dog her ass and leave?
 
You sorry-ass motherfucker!”

Couldn’t argue
with her there.
 
When he’d looked down at
his phone a half hour before, his eyes had translated her text into a picture
of a t-shirt that fell right there where her hips swelled and her ass began—an
ass clad in either no underwear at all or that black thong.
 
The t-shirt in his mind was one she’d had
since middle school, and since she was twenty-one now, she’d outgrown it in the
best of good ways.
 
Everything up top
strained to get out.
 
Deserved
to get out.
 
Talent like that demanded recognition.

Apparently,
Kayleigh had called him over not for a little weeknight ex sex, but to rope him
back into a cruddy relationship so that they could scream at each other all the
time.
 
Again.

She attacked.

“You
sorry-ass-cock-sucking-mother-fucking-dick-licking-ASSHOLE!”

The names, the
profanity, the disrespect fell like the blows she rained down on him from all
directions.
 
She whacked him so fast that
he thought for a moment she had grown extra arms.
 
So he ran, skedaddling out the front door,
across the deck and down to his truck.
 
Kayleigh screaming, yelling, shrieking at him the whole time.

“Oh, I’m SO going
to fix your sorry ass!
 
You’re going to
regret
this
shit, motherfucker!”

He should have
stopped.
 
That was where he messed up; he
never should have left her like that, screaming and yelling out there in front
of her trailer, mad enough to do about anything.
 
Say
about anything to anybody.
 
He should
have stopped, calmed her down.
 
He
couldn’t have ever left her happy—he’d been serious about not getting back
together—but a sad Kayleigh was better for his health than a mad Kayleigh.
 
Maybe if he’d done that, things would have
gone differently.

Maybe then she
wouldn’t have called the police and claimed he’d hit her.
 

The in-processing
office at the Morgan
County Law
Enforcement Center
looked so much like his old guidance counselor’s office that the blast from the
past nearly gave him whiplash
.
 
The same asbestos tile slapped the bottoms of
his slippered feet, and when he sat down he found himself staring at the same
off-white cinderblock wall.
 
The only
difference was that instead of goofy inspirational posters of inspirational
mountain ranges and inspirational phrases (Unleash Your Dreams, Don’t Kill
Yourself On School Property, Even White Trash Like You Have A Purpose), this
wall wore a whole lot of nothing.
 
Not
even a cheesy calendar from the local funeral home.

In another
parallel, Justin did his in-processing with Deputy Petey Starnes, who’d sat
behind him in third-period European History senior year.
 
In class, Petey had read hunting magazines
packed with birds, bears, deer and different ways to kill all of the
above.
 
One time, Petey tapped Justin on
the back and said
check out
this
motherfucker
, and when Justin turned around
he found himself looking at a centerfold, an honest-to-God centerfold like in
Playboy
, of a twelve-point buck.

Now, a year later,
Petey wiped his nose and pushed a telephone across the scuffed wooden desk at
Justin.
 

“Go on, man.
 
At least give it a try.”

“She ain’t gonna
come get me,” Justin mumbled.

“She’s your mama.”

“She’s a bitch.”

“Maybe so, but if
she can go your bond tomorrow, who gives a shit?
 
Let her know you’re here, and as soon as we
can get you in front of a district court judge, your ass is out.”

“I don’t need
anybody to go my bond.
 
My dad left me a
little something; I can get the cash.”

“Yeah, but you’re
going to be in leg chains tomorrow.
 
How’re you going to get to a bank?

Justin looked at
the phone and sighed.
 
Thank God the rule
about a single phone call turned out to be fiction; he had made about ten calls
already, trying to find somebody to come bridge him with the bondsman tomorrow
so he didn’t have to rot in here until his next court date.
 
The response was predictable and uniform:
I feel you, dog, but I’m a little, uh, short
this month, why don’t you call
(fill in name of some other broke
“friend.”)
 
Folks couldn’t even spare it
long enough for him to process out of here and get to a bank, pay them back.

Because he was
alone.
 
Because with his father dead, he
didn’t have anybody.
 
Nothing but a bunch
of “friends” who wouldn’t loan him enough to pay a bondsman for even an hour or
two because at the heart of it, they didn’t really trust him.
 
They worried that he’d come up with a reason
he couldn’t pay them back on time, because that was what
they
did every time they owed somebody money.

“Go on,” Petey
repeated.
 
“I’m telling you, man, you do
not
want to stay.
 
We can keep you in holding overnight, but if
you’re not out come morning, they’re gonna stick you in a bunkroom.
 
There’s guys sleeping on the floor in there.”

“And somebody’s
going to try to fuck me in the ass as soon as the door closes, right?”

Petey shrugged.

“Never know,” he
said.

Justin sighed and
took the phone.
 
He dialed his mother’s
number.
 
It rang.
 
It rang again.
 
On the third ring, her carrier’s robo-answer
picked up.

“The Cricket
Wireless customer you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this
time.
 
Please try again later.”

“Shit,” he muttered,
hanging up.

“Voicemail?”

“Sounds like she
ran out of minutes on her phone again.”

“That sucks,
man.”
 
Petey took the phone and shook his
head.
 
“Listen, I go off shift at seven
in the morning.
 
You tell me where you
think she’s at, I’ll ride by there and tell her what’s going on.”

Justin closed his
eyes.
 
Damn.
 
Damn, damn, damn.

“I didn’t hit
Kayleigh,” he said.
 
“She’s lying.”

“Shit, I would
have.
 
That girl was always gonna get her
ass beat some day.”

“Maybe, but I
didn’t do it.
 
I pissed her off and this
is how she’s getting back at me.
 
I
shouldn’t be here, man.
 
I got to get to
class in the morning!”

“I know,” Petey
said, rising from his chair.
 
“But look,
maybe your mama will come through.
 
And
if not, maybe the judge’ll let you out on a written promise to appear.
 
Come on.”

The doorway to
in-processing opened onto a long hallway.
 
Behind them stood the first floor control station, a glass-enclosed room
roughly the size of in-processing with desks and computer banks and telephones
beeping at the two deputies inside.
 
Just
beyond the door to the control station, a pair of patrol deputies manhandled a
struggling middle-aged man in jeans and a flannel shirt.

“I’m bit!” he
cried.
 
“I need to go to the hospital!”

“Sir, you got to
stop…”

The man tilted his
head down and threw up all over the dirty floor.
 
Whatever he had, Justin hoped it wasn’t
contagious.
 
Petey led him down a long
corridor.
 
Closer to the darkened holding
cells, the smell of pine cleaner yielded to the stronger scents of unwashed bodies
and gas station bathrooms.

Please, God, let this be my only night in
here.
 
I know I don’t call you much, but
I don’t ask for much, either.
 
Okay?

The electric lock
on the door opened when Petey spoke into his radio.
 
He motioned Justin inside.
 
The cell was small, with two bunks stacked
against one wall and a steel toilet/sink combination on the other.

No cellmate, at
least not for now.
 
Chances of midnight
butt rape: zero.

“Here you go.
 
Sleep tight.”
 

“Buenas noches,”
Justin said, but Petey was already gone, his footfalls clomping back up the
corridor.
 

Justin climbed
onto the top bunk.
 
He folded his hands
behind his head and stared up at the blank, cracked ceiling.
 
Down the hall, the commotion at in-processing
intensified.
 
Screaming, yelling, chairs
scraping.
 
Keys on chains rattling.
 
More screams echoing down the corridor,
followed by Petey asking some guy what the damn hell was wrong with him.
 
Sounded like the whole world was down there
raising hell.

He was in jail.

“Fuck
me,
” he muttered.

Yep,
said an invisible Kayleigh.
 
He could almost see her wicked grin twisting
in the bars.
 
Fuck you.

He rolled over on
his side and tried to block out the sounds.
 
He closed his eyes but didn’t sleep, and he was still awake when the
power went out.