The Last Days of October (2 page)

Her head suddenly
swam with the vision of a pile of dead men and women staring sightlessly at the
ceiling.
 
Their lips spoke no words, but
their mottled faces betrayed the disease that had driven them into the
bathroom.
 
They had fallen to a bug that
had existed on its own in some dark corner of Africa
or the Amazon for hundreds of years before a human picked it up and brought it
home.
 
They had died with blood streaming
from their noses and ears and eyes as their throats swelled shut and choked
them to death from the inside.
 
They
would stink, but no flies would buzz about their bodies; the very air would be
pure poison.

 
“What is it?”
 
Amber asked.
 

“I don’t know,”
Heather said.
 
To the door, she called
out, “Hello?
 
Is anyone in there?
 
Are you injured?”

Nothing.
 

Her nerves, coiled
like tightly wound springs, felt ready to pop.

“On second
thought,” she said, stepping away from the door, “let’s leave these be.”

Heather swept the
store again with her eyes.
 
The sun
blazing through the glass made it warm in here even though the air outside bore
a seasonable October chill.
 
Beyond the
abandoned Suburban lay the road.
 
Past
that, a long row of double-stacked mailboxes perched beside the start of a
dirty road announced the presence of a trailer park behind the trees.
 
A big trailer park, judging from the number
of mailboxes.
 
Beside the gas station, a
livestock fence marked the border with a vast open field of grass and dozens of
wandering cattle.

But no people.

She thought now of
the silence in the morning sky as they had packed the truck, the stillness
there as they hiked the woods one last time before leaving.
 
The old man who owned the land hadn’t come to
the door when she’d knocked to thank him for letting them camp there, but she
had assumed then that he just hadn’t been home.

“Can you remember
seeing any other cars on the road this morning?”
 
she asked Amber.
 
“When was the last time we saw another car or
person?”

Amber looked away
as she thought it over, then swallowed.
 
“Right before we set up camp.
 
When you stopped to tell that old dude we were there.”

Oh my God.

A nucleus of dread
pulsed now in Heather’s center, emitting nothing but rivers of cold blood.
 
It sucked the light from the atmosphere
around her and dimmed the sun.
 
Something
had happened here, something bad, but it had happened elsewhere, too, and
probably everywhere.
 
Because this store,
she felt, had been deserted for days.
 
And no one from the trailer park next door had come over to loot it.

“We need to get
out of here,” Heather said, taking Amber’s hand and pulling her towards the
door.
 
“Now.”

3.

“How about now?”

Amber shook her phone.
 
She waved it from side to side, searching for
the signal that had eluded them since the Shell station.
 
“Still nothing.”

“Take it off of
airplane mode.”

“It’s not
on
airplane mode, Mom, I just don’t have
any bars.”

The state of
abandonment in the Shell station extended to the south on Highway 49.
 
On either side of the Durango, the empty fields and tobacco sheds
gave way to houses that grew closer together as they crossed into the Deep
Creek city limits and 49 became Burlington Road.
 
Plenty of cars, none of them in motion.
 
No one raking leaves, no one walking around
with leaf blowers.
 
She shivered as a new
housing development flashed by on the left just before the high school.
 
The General Electric plant approached on the
right and fell behind them.

She glanced in the
rearview mirror.
 
The employee parking
lot at GE teemed with cars.
 
From the
outside, it looked for all the world like business as usual.
 
As long as she ignored the complete absence
of traffic on the outer edges of Deep Creek and the dead air on her radio, she
could pretend all of this was normal.

Please let him be okay,
she silently
prayed.
 
She had ignored God for most of
her adult life, but He now felt medievally close.
 
Dunked in the water, washed
in the blood, she prayed.
 
Please let Mike be okay.
 
I know I said some really mean stuff the
other day and I know I
thought
even
meaner stuff but I didn’t mean any of it and all I want in this world is to see
him again so PLEASE LET HIM BE OKAY

“What?”
 
Amber asked.

“I didn’t say
anything.”

“Yes, you
did.
 
Your lips are moving.”

Heather swallowed.

“I’m praying,” she
said.

She swung off
Burlington Road onto Third Street.
 
The
outer business district retreated before a neighborhood of grand old Craftsman homes
with rambling porches and long roofs that gave no indication of what had
happened here.
 
She slowed to a crawl for
a better look.
 
She searched for anything
out of place—bodies, burned cars, damaged homes, anything to erase this giant
question mark.

Beside her, Amber
drew a ragged breath as her eyes filled with tears.
 
“Should we stop?”
 
she asked.
 
“Knock on a door or something, see if anybody’s home?
 
I mean, maybe something did happen, but
there’s no way they can
all
be gone,
right?
 
Mom?”

Heather wasn’t
listening.
 
Outside her window, the
two-story homes lining Third Street stared back at her.
 
These houses were older than the others
farther out, their construction predating the time when cost efficiency
demanded that each home be a carbon copy of its neighbor.
 
The trees had grown here, and now they
reached above the rooflines with branches from which they drizzled golden
leaves upon neat and well-manicured lawns.
 
The grass had grown nearly invisible with no one to rake the
leaves.
 
They covered the grass and the
sidewalk and danced now in the street to the music of a light autumn breeze and
the choir of desertion.

Just then,
something else about the houses caught Heather’s eye.
 
She slowed, and then stopped completely.

Along both sides
of Third Street, front doors stood open to the leafy yards.
 
Some stood open all the way, some not so
much.
 
But they all stood open.
 
And on the front door of the home nearest
where she’d stopped, someone had painted a cross in black spray paint.

It was a man-size
cross, the stipes extending from top to bottom and the patibulum spanning the
width of the door.
 
The artist had
evidently worked in haste, with little care to the symmetry of his creation; he
hadn’t painted the cross on his door as much as slashed it there with the brush
or spray can.
 
This haphazard appearance
lent it a panicked quality that Heather felt crawling in the pit of her
stomach.

There were others
just like it up and down the street.
 
Although she couldn’t see every door from her vantage point in the Durango’s driver’s seat,
she felt certain that most, if not all, of the houses bore similar
crosses.
 
Signals, perhaps, from the
inhabitants or the government that the same danger that had struck their
neighbors had also struck them and that those approaching the door should stop
lest they also fall victim to it.

But why a
Christian cross?

Heather
shuddered.
 
On the other side of the
glass, dead leaves scraped along the street and hissed on the inundated
sidewalks and lawns.
 
Millions, billions
of dead leaves along this street and a hundred thousand others, all lined with
houses that stood staring at the remains of the world through empty glass eyes.

“Do you think
Daddy’s okay?”
 
Amber asked.

Heather took her
foot off the brake and the truck began rolling forward again.
 
“Let’s go home,” she said.
 

It had been a
stupid fight, in hindsight.
 
Not that
they argued like a pair of rocket scientists on the best of days—an element of
the ridiculous usually found its way into all their conflicts, ensuring that no
matter how it started or turned out, she could postgame herself into
embarrassment over at least some aspect of it.
 
In this case, she took something relatively minor and ensured that it
grew.
 
And while the Asshole Award
ultimately went to Mike in this one, she’d done her part.
 
Yes, she had.

He’d found the
bank statement—
a
 
bank statement, actually, because she’d split
the money into three different accounts for FDIC purposes pending a decision on
exactly what to do with the almost four hundred thousand dollars that the trust
had paid.
 
The statements were supposed
to go to her post office box.
 
Apparently, she’d had something on her mind at the time she funded the
third account, because the first statement for that one came straight to the
house.

“A hundred and
fifty grand,” he remarked when she came home from the store on Wednesday, the
day before the camping trip.
 
She found
him sitting in the kitchen in his jeans and Navy sweatshirt, the envelope open
on the table before him beside a plate of peanut butter toast.
 
Although his hard and handsome features had
softened with the addition of post-retirement fat, he still wore his blond hair
militarily short.
 
He ran his hands over
the freshly-cut stubble.
 
“Wow.”

She concealed a
flash of irritation behind the grocery bags in her arms.
 
She set them on the counter and began placing
the cold items in the refrigerator.
 
She
kept her back to him as she said, “That’s part of my grandma’s trust.
 
You’ve known about that.”

“I know.
 
I’m just saying.”

“You’re just
saying what?”

“It’s a lot of
money.”

“It is.”
 
Her back tensed, as if it ran off the same
wire as the rock-solid muscles in her jaw.
 
“And?”

He didn’t reply
right away.
 
She felt him back there,
staring at her.
 
Thinking,
analyzing.
 
Wondering.

Go ahead
, she thought.
 
Bring it on. Because there’s an
and
in there somewhere, right?
  
Always is.

“And nothing,” he
said at last.
 
“I was just thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

“I don’t
know.
 
I was just thinking maybe we could
take a little bit of this and put it down on a truck.
 
Trade the Ford in, put something down,
finance the rest.
 
Get something a little
newer.”

“What’s wrong with
the Ford?”

“It has two
hundred thousand miles on it.”

Cold items in the
refrigerator.
 
Boxed items in the cabinet
above the coffee machine.
 
Canned goods
in the pantry.
 
Everything in its
place.
 
“The Durango isn’t far behind
it.”

“Okay, let me say
it another way; my truck has two hundred thousand miles on it and I just spent
the last two decades risking my life for my country and this family.
 
That’s what’s wrong with it.
 
Twenty years, not one new vehicle.
 
I don’t think I’m asking for much.
 
I mean, Jesus, Heather, unclench.
 
I think if I stuck a lump of coal up your ass
right now, you’d make a damn diamond.”

Her jaw tightened
so much her teeth hurt.
 
Red, angry pain
enveloped her cheeks and spread upwards into the rest of her skull.
 
Her temples throbbed.

Careful.

But she couldn’t
be careful.
 
Not today, not about
this.
 
Daylight still burned in the sky
over the houses beyond her window, but this was the middle of the night again
and this was just another instance of him waking her up and turning her
whichever way he wanted.
 
Doing
whatever he wanted, like he always
did.
 
Not asking, oh no, because asking
implied some level of give-a-shit about her feelings in the matter and when
Mike wanted something, she was going to give it to him.

“You’re not
sticking
anything
up my ass,” she
said.
 
She spoke with her hands on the
counter, back to Mike.
 
Her jaw barely
moved.
 
“And we’re not going to just plow
into this and blow it all on a truck when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with
the one you’ve got.
 
That money is for
Amber’s college.
 
Her grad school, if she
goes.
 
And after that, just her.”

So that she can be independent.
 
So that she can support herself and never
have to rely on another person ever.

“Right.
 
You’re going to spend four hundred grand on
her
schooling
.
 
For our girl that’s frankly getting her ass
kicked by community college right now.
 
I
think you’ll have just a leeetle bit left over, sugarpie.”

Now she
turned.
 
She felt the poison in her eyes,
felt her brain and her mouth running free.
 
Thinking of nothing.
 

That was never
good.

“You know what,
Mike?
 
Kiss my ass.”

He blinked at
her.
 
His eyebrows rose.

“How dare you say
the first thing about what
I
want to
do with
my
grandmother’s money?
 
I don’t think you really want a truck, you
just want to see me spend this on something for
you
because
you
want to
control this just like you want to control
everything
else!”

He snorted
derisively.
 
“Whatever.
 
You’re not going to spend a dime of that on
Amber.
 
I know what that money’s for.
 
Oh, yeah.”

“Do you, now?”

“You’re going to
leave me.
 
You’ve been waiting on this
shit for years.
 
Sitting on your ass
while I bust mine, and now that you finally got your mitts on your granny’s
dough, it’s bye-bye Mike, smell you later!”

“That is
so
not true!”
 
she hissed.

“Bull
shit!
 
The minute that check came in, you changed.
 
Right away.
 
At first, I was like, goddamn, where’d all that mouth come from?
 
Then I was like goddamn, Heather’s sure got
the bitch in her all of a sudden, I wonder what’s going on.”
 

He smiled, but his
eyes didn’t follow his lips.
 
This wasn’t
a happy smile.
 
This was a Mike smile, a
smartass, oh-I-see-it-now smile.

“But then I
figured it out.
 
You know, you’re right,
I don’t actually want a new truck.
 
I
don’t give a rat’s ass about a new truck any more than
you
give a rat’s ass about how I feel about anything.
 
I just wanted to see if you’d share.
 
Or if you had plans.
 
And you do.”

She stared at him.

He stared
back.
 
“Where’s your phone?”
 
he asked.

“What do you want
with my phone?”

“I want to see
it.
 
I want to see what you say to him.”

“To who?”
 
she asked.