The Last Days of October (11 page)

Petey lifted his
head with his eyes closed.
 
But then he
raised his arm and pressed a button on the control board.

The buzzer
sounded.
 
Justin darted sideways and
depressed the handle, tearing the door open and exploding into the public
lobby.
 
Two rows of empty plastic chairs
bolted to the floor waited for him.
 
Portraits of past Morgan County head sheriffs stared at him from their
resting places on the walls.

Another window to
the control room looked out over the lobby.
 
Through the glass, he could see Petey begin to shake.
 
His spine suddenly straightened and he bent
backwards over the back of the chair.
 
His mouth opened wide towards the ceiling.

He was changing.

You are one lucky motherfucker, Lesner,
said the nearest sheriff from his frame.

“Yeah,”
 
Justin muttered.
 
“Real lucky.”

Hoping his luck
would hold long enough to get him to Petey’s truck, he clutched the keys and
ventured out into the night.

13.

Heather and Justin
laid the bodies on the grass in front of the courthouse and covered them with a
plastic tarpaulin from the bed of Justin’s truck.
 
Then they removed their gloves and sat on the
tailgate while Justin told his story.
 
When he stopped talking, Heather sat for a long time and waited because
he hadn’t finished.
 
He simply stopped in
the middle.
 
He swallowed and looked off
into the distance, obviously reliving something but not telling her what it
was.

“And?” she finally
asked.

“And I got home,”
he said, shrugging and looking at the street beneath his feet.

“I mean, what
happened between then and now?
 
That was
four days ago.
 
How did you survive?”

He shrugged again,
this time throwing in a shake of the head for good measure.
 
His face looked drawn, old.
 
Heather wondered how she could have ever
mistaken him for a child.
 
“I didn’t
answer the door.
 
That’s how I survived.”

She heard
something up the street and tensed, looking in the direction of the noise.
 
In the intersection, dead leaves jumped and
swirled.

“I thought for a
while it was a virus or bacteria,” Justin said.
 
“Because these crosses don’t work for shit.
 
But these folks
talk
to you, see.
 
They ask
your permission to come in.
 
They could
break down your door, but they don’t; it’s like they’re obeying certain rules.”

Heather thought of
her conversation with Mike the night before.
 
She hadn’t thought for an instant that she’d been communicating with a
sickened version of her husband.
 
That
had been…

Devil magic

Something else
entirely.

“It goes
fast.
 
Petey made it twenty minutes,
maybe half an hour because it just kind of nicked his hand.
 
They get a good bite on you, I think it’s
quicker.
 
I think that’s one of the ways
it spread so fast.”

“What are the
other ways?”

He braced his
hands on the tailgate and slid down into a standing position.
 
He reached into the pocket of his jeans and
wiped his nose with a handkerchief that he’d stored there.
 
“It uses our feelings,” he said.

Mike.

“My ex-girlfriend,
my mom and all my friends came to my door,” Justin said.
 
“
Come
to
my door, I mean; it’s every goddamned night.
 
They show up and they talk.
 
And
you’re lonely, right, because you’ve been hiding out in your apartment for days
on end without hearing another human voice and you’re thinking that maybe
you’re the last man on Earth.
 
The first
night, you almost open the door because you’re like hey, it’s my mom, I need to
let her in.
 
But it’s not her, and you
know
it’s not her, it’s something that’s
taken over her body.
 
And her mind.
 
It picks up her thoughts like a fucking
magazine and reads them to you.
 
It’s
sick.
 
But you know what’s even more
sick?
 
You.
 
Because after about a day of not seeing other
people, you get to where you’ll sit there by the door and converse with these
assholes because hey, some company’s better than none.
 
And once you figure out they need your
permission to come inside and you’re really not in any physical danger as long
as you keep that door closed, it’s like, fuck it.”

He paused and cast
a sideways glance at the tarp-covered lumps on the yellow grass.
 
Flies buzzed there, looking for a way
in.
 
Others buzzed beneath it, looking
for a way out.

“And to be honest
with you, I don’t know if I want to meet other people.
 
This isn’t the only place in town I’ve seen
this shit today.”

“What happened to
them?”
 
Heather asked.
 
“The ones who did this?”

“I haven’t seen or
heard them in a few days,” he replied.
 
“I think they’re probably under a house somewhere.
 
Or in a basement, closet, whatever.
 
Somewhere dark.”

A silence
developed then, a chilly space furnished only with the buzzing of flies and the
occasional chatter of leaves.
 
He looked
at the leaf-strewn pavement for a long time, hands folded between his knees.

“Sorry you had to
shoot that dude,” he said.
 
“It’s not
exactly a great world even in the daytime.
 
You have the folks that lynch people, and then you have the ones that
cut the bodies down.
 
Hopefully, the ones
that did this got bit.
 
You and me
didn’t.”

“We didn’t,”
Heather agreed.

The October breeze
sloughed around the buildings, down the street and through the space between
them.
 
The omnipresent leaves chattered
with the sound of cockroach bodies in a coffee can.
 
Justin sighed and looked up to where Main
Street unwound into the silent distance.
 
Heather looked the other way.
 
She
felt they had run out of things to talk about, but she didn’t want to simply
send the boy on his way; it didn’t seem right somehow, to meet another human
being and then just let him go.
 

Last time you met a human being you shot him
,
said her inner paranoiac.
 
Because he turned out to be a fucking snake.

True.
 
But Justin wasn’t Clyde.
 
And if she took that attitude towards
everybody, she and Amber both were in for a lonely rest of their lives.
 
However short that turned out to be.

She cleared her
throat.
 
“Listen,” she said.
 
“I was lying about my husband.
 
He’s not coming.”

He looked back at
her and shrugged.
 
“I kind of figured.”

“He’s dead.
 
One of them, I mean.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, it
does.
 
What it means is, me and my
daughter are alone in this.
 
And I don’t
know you and you don’t know me, but I would really, really like it if you
would…I don’t know…come with us today.
 
We’re trying to figure out what to do next, and we could use some help.”

He didn’t respond
right away.
 
For a moment, she thought he
was going to tell her no; that she was right, he didn’t know her, and because
of that he didn’t feel comfortable going somewhere with her.
 
Because they lived in a world where vampires
walked at night and where by day, the remains of the living made human
sacrifices to a God who, by all appearances, wasn’t listening.
 
Where a woman could confess to killing
somebody and that somehow seemed normal.

But then he
smiled.
 
It was a broad, genuine
smile.
 
Warm and trusting.
 
Trust
worthy.

“I think I’d like
that,” he said.

14.

An hour after her
mother left for the store, Amber nearly lost her mind.
 
The thought of her neighbors and her own
father sleeping in the crawl spaces filled her with revulsion too great to
contain within her own body.
 
She had
actually gone for the door—for what reason, she didn’t know—but an invisible
hand pulled her back.

No.

“It’s daylight,”
she mumbled through the tears in her eyes.
 
“It’s our time.”

You don’t know who’s out there.

Can’t go out at night.
 
Can’t go out in the day.
 
Can’t go anywhere.
 
Daddy’s dead yet not dead at the same time,
he’s laying under the house, he might be under her feet right now, staring up
at the sounds with his mouth open.

He’s following you under there.
 
He’s skittering
.

She screamed then
and fled into the living room, where daylight blasted in through the great
picture window.
 
She flung herself on the
couch and screamed into the throw pillows.
 
She screamed until she was hoarse.
 
And then she just moaned.

I cannot stay here.

Just then, the
Durango pulled into the driveway.
 
Moments later, a white pickup pulled up on the curb in front of the
house, startling her.
 
Her heart leapt,
lifting her up off the couch with it.

 
She
found other people.

Another
person,
anyway.
 
The driver’s door opened, and a boy
emerged.
 
As he followed her mother up
the walkway to the porch, she realized she knew him from class at MCC.
 
Had seen him, anyway.
 
He had smiled at her from time to time, and
recently worked his way up to saying “hey” and waving at her on his way out of
the parking lot.
 
Given her level of
interaction with people she’d met since moving to Deep Creek, this made him one
of her best friends.

The front door
opened.
 
She heard her mother talking to
the boy as they stepped inside and crossed the foyer into the living room.
 
She rose to meet them, arms folded.
 
She took one look at Mom’s face and froze.

A purple bruise
covered her left cheek and reached up over her left eye.
 
Before she could ask about it, Mom cleared
her throat and spoke.
 
“Amber, this is
Justin.
 
He’s been here since the
beginning.
 
We need to talk.”

They sat at the
kitchen table, drinking instant coffee while Justin told the story of his
survival and meeting up with her mother.
 
Then Mom told her about Clyde.
 

Amber’s head
spun.
 
“God,” she whispered.
 
Mom reached out and took her by the hand.

“So…all the cops
are dead?”
 
Amber asked.
 
“Everybody’s gone but us?”

“I don’t know that
for sure yet,” Justin said.
 
“I had
really just got started exploring when I ran into your mom.
 
But I haven’t seen anybody.”

Amber leaned
forward, covering her face and groaning softly while Mom asked him about the
tactical aspects of the vampires—what they could and couldn’t stand, what they
talked about, when they came and when they left.
 
Amber barely listened.
 
She hadn’t slept well on the bathroom floor,
and her body ached in a dozen different places.
 

But her physical
discomfort paled in comparison to the aching of her battered psyche, a pain
enhanced by one simple sentence:
I
haven’t seen anybody.
 
She didn’t
like that at all.

“No one’s come
through?” she asked.

“Just you guys.”

“So I’m thinking
we need to stay put,” Mom said.
 
“At
least for now.
 
We don’t know what’s out
there.
 
Those roads could be crawling
with people like Clyde.”

“And this place is
crawling with vampires,” Amber replied.
 
“There’s actually one under our feet right now.
 
What about finding help?
 
I mean…the army’s only two hours away!”

“We don’t know
that,” Mom said.
 
She looked over at
Justin.
 
“Have you seen any
helicopters?
 
Jets?”

Justin shook his
head.

“So how likely is
it that there’s a functioning army presence nearby when there aren’t any
helicopters?”
 
Mom folded her arms across
her chest.
 
She looked almost satisfied
with this—like she didn’t want the army to be down there at Bragg, ready to
take them in and help.
 
As if…

As if she wants to stay here.
 
And be with him.

Mom seemed not to
notice Amber frowning.
 
“We could leave
here, risk our necks getting through Burlington and find nothing there.
 
Then what?”

“Then we find a
place to hole up for the night and head up to Norfolk in the morning.”

“And find the same
nothing
there.”

“But there are
ships,” Amber said.
 
“Carriers,
submarines, destroyers.
 
Things that
weren’t in port when this happened.
 
Eventually, they’re going to come back.
 
We’ll be there to meet them.”

Mom leaned
forward.
 
“Waiting in a metropolitan area
of over a million and a half people.
 
All
vampires now.”

“So we just stay
here and…wait?
 
Do nothing?
 
Wait for winter to come so we can freeze our
asses off and eat crappy canned food?
 
What kind of plan is that?”

“Maybe we should
check out the rest of Deep Creek,” Justin offered.
 
“Before we have this discussion, I mean.
 
Like I said, I just got started exploring.
 
We could see if there are other people here,
normal ones.
 
See what their plan
is.
 
Maybe we can still leave, but it
would be good to go in a group.
 
An armed
one.
 
Safety in numbers and all.”

“I think that’s a
good idea,” Mom said with a nod.
 
“We
don’t want to do anything rash.”

Mom didn’t want to
do anything at all, Amber realized.
 
Given the choice, she’d probably stay here forever.
 
With
him
under the house.

But he would have
to figure out how to gain entry into the house first.
 
As terrifying as last night had been, that
thing and its friends hadn’t come in.
 
Because vampires needed permission to
enter.
 
As long as no one gave it they
could remain here indefinitely.

She looked down at
the floor.
 
Unless we lose our minds first
, she thought.

She sighed and
rubbed her temples.
 
“Okay,” she said,
“so where do we go?
 
Check the schools
out, see if there are any disaster centers?”

“That’s one idea,”
Justin said.
 
“But I was thinking of
someplace more…I don’t know…supplied.
 
The first place people go when there’s a natural disaster or something
bad happens.
 
I was actually on my way
there when I ran across your mom.”

“And where is
this?”
 
Mom asked.

Justin
smiled.
 

“Wal-Mart,” he
said.