The Last Days of October (13 page)

No response.

“This is Heather
Palmer.
 
I am looking for other
survivors.
 
If you’re in here, sound off
now.
 
If you need assistance, please make
some sort of noise.”

She waited.
 
As the seconds ticked by with no response,
her heart rate began to slow.
 
She was
alone.
 
Wherever the owners of those cars
had gone, it wasn’t here.

She backed away
from the register and moved sideways down the length of the store’s front end,
pistol pointed at the ground.
 
She
rounded the last register and walked slowly down the main aisle that encircled
the store.
 
Aisle to aisle, everything
remained in its place.
 
She saw no
overturned displays like the one in the Shell station, no shell casings on the
floor.
 
In the sporting goods section,
braces of rifles and shotguns stood undisturbed in their glass cases.
 

They all got bit out in the parking lot. One
by one, leaving the store with their purchases, they walked right into an
ambush.
 
And they never came back in
because…

“Vampires don’t
need any of this stuff,” she finished in a mumble.
 
She relaxed and released a long breath.
 
That this disaster hadn’t left enough
survivors to loot a Wal-Mart bothered her, but she could think about that
later.
 
Right now, they needed as much
food and supplies as they could pull out of this place before the generator cut
off.

Because then it
would get dark in here.

She hadn’t been
keeping track of time, but she felt that she couldn’t have much of those ten
minutes left.
 
She turned and headed
quickly for the door.

16.

Justin waited in
silence in the back seat of the Durango.
 
He had seen the Wal-Mart complex this dead only once before, during an
ice storm two years ago.
 
Trees
unaccustomed to harsh winters had suddenly collapsed beneath the weight of the
ice settling on their branches, and their falling cut power lines all over
Morgan County.
 
The power failure dipped
Deep Creek into the nineteenth century for approximately forty-eight
hours.
 
Temporarily deprived of its
computer systems, Wal-Mart closed.
 
And
as closed Wal-Mart, so closed everything else.

“There’s nobody in
there.”

He looked away
from the store.
 
Amber sat in the
driver’s seat ahead of him.
 
He could see
nothing but her deep brown hair, but her voice carried a despairing certainty
that said she was on the verge of tears.
 

“How do you know
that?”

Her hands clenched
around the steering wheel.
 
“These
outside lights,” she said.
 
“They cut
them on every evening at dusk and they cut them off in the morning.
 
Since nowhere else has power, that tells you
they’re running off a generator.
 
Generators take gas and effort to keep them running.
 
If there were people in there tending it,
they’d cut back on all unnecessary load.
 
Here we are in the middle of the day, and the damn lights are on.”

Justin looked back
at the store.

“And they’re on,”
she continued, “because the morning after this happened, there was nobody left
to turn them off.
 
They were already
dead.”

“You don’t know
that,” he said.

“Yes I do.
 
Everyone’s dead.
 
This whole town is filled with vampires, and
my
dad
is living under my house and
he’s going to come back tonight, and tomorrow morning
she still won’t want to leave!
”

She slapped the
steering wheel and hung her head.
 
Justin
leaned forward to lay a hand on her shoulder—it seemed like the thing to do—but
stopped when he saw movement at the front of the store.

Heather emerged
into the sunlight.
 
She waved.

“Your mom’s back.”

Amber straightened
up and turned around.
 
Her eyes were wet
and red.

“She’s waving at
us,” he said.
 
“Drive up there.
 
Maybe she found somebody.”

Amber executed a
quick U-turn, racing across the lot to where her mother stood at the
storefront.
 
Justin leapt out.

“Well?” he asked.

Heather shook her
head.
 
“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”
 
Amber asked.
 
“There’s nobody in there?
 
Nobody
at all?”

“I went all the way
to the sporting goods section in the back, I got on the PA up front and nobody
answered me.
 
Nothing jumped out at me,
either.
 
The place is deserted.”

“On to the high
school, then,” Justin said.

“We’re kind of low
on food.
 
It would be a good idea to grab
as much as we can before the generator runs out of gas and we can’t come in
here anymore.
 
We should get other
things, too.
 
Medicine, soap, clothes,
things like that.”

“You mean, like,
loot Wal-Mart?”

Heather nodded
once.
 
“Pretty much.
 
You can stay out here if you like, but we can
get a lot more if we all three pitch in.”

He looked at the
entryway rising up behind her.
 
This
close to the store, the building seemed to stretch on for miles in either
direction.
 
He hadn’t yet given much
thought to resupply, but Heather had a point; they would need things.
 
As long as they could still see in there,
Wal-Mart was as good a source as any.

You do not want to be in there when those
lights go out.

No, he
didn’t.
 
But he didn’t want to sit out
here and let somebody else do the hard work, either.
 
Especially not a woman.
 
A
couple of women
, he corrected himself as he saw Amber already walking
through the door.

He sighed.

“Well, let’s go,
then,” he said.

Inside, speakers
mounted on the steel roof trusses played elevator music.
 
He had read once that stores played crap like
that to keep everybody calm when they had to wait more than five minutes in
line or when they couldn’t find their favorite breakfast cereal.
 
Because people, even adults, were all
basically babies.
 
You could sing them
lullabies to keep them from wigging out.

It wasn’t working
on him.

He gripped his
cart’s handle with hands like claws.
 
Heather led the way with her own cart, Amber and Justin bobbing along
behind her.
 
Amber grabbed a handful of candy
bars on her way past the first checkout line rack and threw them in her cart.

“Keep your eyes
open for anything funny,” Heather said over her shoulder.

But there was
nothing
funny, nothing at all.
 
This bugged Justin in ways he couldn’t
explain.
 
His mind moved with the cold
molasses of too much thought and not enough sleep.
 
His hands operating on their own, he grabbed
boxes of beef jerky and several bubble packs of cigarette lighters.
 
He hurried to catch up with Heather and Amber
before they passed the pharmacy, and he found himself wincing with each squeak
of his cart’s wheel.
 
As they liberated
vitamins, medicine and toiletries from the shelves in the pharmacy section, his
unease grew.
 
He felt like a thief.
 
Stealing in broad daylight.

No,
he thought.
 
Not
broad daylight.
 
When the electricity
goes, this place will be dark.

Oh, yeah.
 
Pitch black, actually.
 
Big-box stores never had windows, and this
one was no different.
 
As their little
caravan left the pharmacy and passed Home & Garden, he looked quickly
around him and realized he couldn’t see a door or window anywhere.
 
No matter how high the sun stood in the sky
outside, in here it would always be nighttime.

Stop it
.

They passed
Linens, Kitchenware, Arts & Crafts.
 
Automotive.
 
He shot a look down
the long main rear aisle at the grocery section at the other end of the giant
store.
 
For once, nothing and no one
obstructed his view.

“Flashlights,”
Heather said.
 
“Batteries, cooking fuel,
propane.
 
Grab fishing line, hooks,
sinkers.
 
See if you can find a pair of
binoculars, too; we’ll need some of those.”

He picked up a
handheld spotlight, the kind he suspected Petey Starnes of using to hunt deer
on the backroads at night.
 
One million candlepower!
 
The box read.
 
Battery included!
 
He placed it in his cart.
 
Amber looked back over her shoulder.

“What are you
waiting for?” she asked.
 
“Come on.”
 

She disappeared
around the endcap.
 
He looked up and saw
the storeroom door staring back at him with two black eyes.
 
If he gazed at it long enough, it almost
became a face.

Come inside,
it beckoned.
 
There’s
more back here, in the dark.
 
We have so
much for you, too much to list.
 
Come on
back and take a look.

He left the aisle
the way he had come in, from the end farthest away from the door to the storeroom.

They sped away
from Outdoors, passing Furniture on their left and Electronics on their
right.
 
Invisible hands laced themselves
around his throat, pressing his Adam’s apple ever so slightly.
 
They grew tighter around his windpipe with
each passing second.

Amber looked over
her shoulder.
 
“You okay?”

“I just want to
get out of here,” he said.
 
His voice
sounded squeaky in his own ears.
 
“All
I’m doing is grabbing random shit anyway.”

“I know, right?”

“We’ll be done in
a few minutes,” Heather said.
 
“Let’s get
food.
 
I’ll grab the canned goods.
 
Justin, you get peanut butter and anything
else in a jar.
 
Amber, dry goods.
 
Flour, sugar, salt.
 
Cornmeal.
 
Anything in a sack.”

Heather and Amber
started for their respective aisles.
 
Justin remained at the crossroads where the main aisle joined the
grocery section.
 
The invisible hands had
grown tighter around his throat, but they hadn’t pinched his nose shut yet and
now he stood still, sniffing the air.

Something stank.

Amber disappeared
into an aisle.
 
Heather, noticing Justin
wasn’t moving, stopped and stared at him expectantly.

How could they not
smell this?
 
The air reeked of rot and
decay.
 
Flies and maggots, flesh
putrefying in the still.
 
He tried to
swallow and couldn’t.

A red light
flashed in his head.
 
He pushed his cart
forward, charging through the paper goods aisle.
 
He halted at the end.
 
Where Meats began.

His cart squeaked
once as it stopped.
 
The high-pitched
noise disturbed what appeared to be a billion flies congregating on hundreds of
flank steaks, cube steaks, rotting hamburger.
 
Something had ripped the packages open, sucked them dry of blood.
 
White trays lay scattered all about, offering
a buffet of decaying meat.

Get out get out getoutgetoutGETOUTNOW NOW
NOW NOW!

But he couldn’t
move.
 
His breath caught in his chest as
he stared at the torn meat packages.
 
The
generator’s hum seemed unnaturally loud now, drowning out the Muzak and all
thought.
 
His eyes darted to his
right.
 
Up there by the dairy cases,
where the milk fridges united with the chillers of butter and cheese, another
storeroom door stared at him.

The milk.
 
Solid white curds floated atop the
translucent yellow whey, seeming to glow against the black backdrop of the
cooler room behind it.
 
It had curdled.
 
In a fridge.

They did just fine in the jail.
 
There were lights there, too, bright
fluorescent ones just like these…

His paralysis
broke then.
 
He grabbed the cart and
began pushing it at a run down the aisle.
 
He needed to abandon it but his hands wouldn’t listen.
 
Bereft of time to argue, he just ran.

“It’s a trap!” he
screamed.

Somewhere to his
rear, behind the wall holding the coolers of rotten meat, a generator cut
off.
 
The overhead lights dimmed.
 
And then they blinked out entirely.