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. Trustworthy.
“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.
&nbs
p; 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.
15.
Mike hadn’t liked Heather’s friends from high school. He met them one time, when they all came up for a long weekend at Virginia Beach and everybody got drunk in the hotel room—Mike, the only boyfriend present, included. He laughed and goofed around, deployed his charm without actually hitting on any of her girls and ruining everybody’s time. He didn’t get loud or belligerent, pass out or break anything—all things, her friends had told her, that other boyfriends sometimes did when the liquor flowed. They all loved him, this handsome young sailor that had electrified Heather’s life with romance. Out in the parking lot on Sunday, when everyone had to again go their separate ways, Elise wrapped her in an exuberant hug and whispered, “Hang on to that one. He’s special.”
They all loved him, and Heather had thought the feeling mutual.
Apparently not.
“I don’t know,” Mike said later, “I mean, they’re cool and all, yeah, but they’re just…I don’t know. Different, I guess.”
“How are they different?”
This conversation had occurred a few weeks later at a booth at Doumar’s in Norfolk, attacking banana splits after a healthy dinner of hot dogs and fries. He shrugged and dug his spoon into his ice cream. “Like I said, I don’t know. Just different. Jennifer and Elise are these giggly sorority girls who have absolutely no responsibilities. Get drunk, party, spend their daddies’ money, maybe go to class every now and then. They’re basically kids. And Kathy? Same damn thing, only her daddy doesn’t have any money for her to spend and so she gets drunk, parties, and occasionally shows up for work at K-Mart. Where she’s probably going to stay. She’s going to get knocked up by some loser and make like a tornado.”
“Make like a tornado?”
“Break a bunch of shit and wind up in a trailer park.”
She remembered her face burning then, her eyes narrowing with hurt and annoyance. Jennifer, Elise and Kathy had been her girls since elementary school. She had no sisters of her own; these were her siblings, her family. It stung to hear Mike criticize them. She felt like he was talking about her.
“That’s a nasty thing to say,” she said. Her voice came out all wobbly, as if she wanted to cry.
“I’m not being nasty,” he replied, “I’m just calling it like I see it.” Another chunk of his banana split disappeared. He chewed, swallowed and cocked his head thoughtfully. “But I don’t think you see it,” he said when his mouth was clear. “I think you’re all like, ‘best friends forever,’ and you don’t see any of this shit. You don’t see that you really don’t have much in common with these chicks anymore.”
He raised his spoon and shook it at her like a judge with a gavel. “Jennifer and Elise think they’re better than us,” he said. “You didn’t catch that, but I did. They think they’re all big and bad because they’re in college and we’re just stupid sailors. Talking about sorority this and sorority that, this party, that party…I mean, shut up, you know? Did you hear Elise explain to me three times what a ‘pledge’ was? I wanted to say, ‘I heard you the first time, I don’t care, shut the fuck up.’ And while you’re at it, kiss my ass. My girlfriend guards the world’s largest Navy base. Our government trusts her with aircraft carriers. Nuclear submarines. And you think you’re better than she is because you’re studying Underwater Basket Weaving at the University of I-Better-Find-A-Husband-Or-I’m-Buttass-Fucked?”
She looked down at her dish. Vanilla and chocolate ice cream ran in rivulets over the remains of a banana and pooled around a lonesome cherry. Everything liquefying.
“And Kathy?” Mike continued. “Don’t get me started. That girl is a slut, bottom-shelf welfare trainee. All she talked about the whole time was going out to the bars and finding her a sailor. Between Jennifer and Elise with their circus of a college and Kathy’s dick-seeking missiles, I thought I was going to go crazy.”
He stopped chewing for a moment and frowned, as if the banana split had said something he didn’t like. He swallowed slowly and looked out the window at the parking lot beyond. A gaggle of students from the high school a block away laughed their way over to an ancient station wagon with faux wooden sides. Apparently deep in thought, Mike watched them.
“People like that are going to get you in trouble,” he said somberly, “because they aren’t like you. They aren’t serious about life, and you are. You’re real. You’re in the world. You’re an adult, you have responsibilities. They don’t understand that and they don’t like it, so they try to bring you down to their level. They act like they’re your friends, but they want to see you fuck up.”
He nodded, agreeing with himself. Heather just stared at him,
“They want you to be just like them. If I hadn’t been th
ere that weekend, they’d have dragged you out to the bars and tried to get you to sleep with some random dickhead. They’d have had you drunk the whole time. If your command tried to get a hold of you to cover a shift, you’d have been too hammered or hung over to make it. Wouldn’t have bothered them any. Would have tickled them, actually. They’d have thought it was funny. ‘Heather had a serious boyfriend and a real job. Let’s see if we can fuck up her life so that she can be a loser like us.’ It’s scary.”
She glanced down at the remains of her banana split. She wasn’t hungry anymore. She couldn’t imagine getting anything past the lump in her throat, the lump that threatened to explode into tears right here in the middle of Doumar’s. “What are you saying?” she asked in a whisper.
“I don’t know,” he said with a blasé toss of one shoulder. “I guess…I’d rather pop all my toes with a nutcracker than spend another weekend with a bunch of girls like that. And I’d really prefer it if you kept your distance from people like that. I don’t want you hanging out with them anymore.”
So she let them go. She didn’t even invite them to her wedding or tell them when she had Amber. Now, two decades later, she drove through a deserted town with her hands gripping the steering wheel and thought, I chose him. I always chose him.
They rolled through town at fifteen miles an hour, windows down so as not to impede their hearing. The Wal-Mart complex sat on the southern edge of Deep Creek, where the highway forgot its country nature and grew suburban ambitions. Normally teeming with traffic, the two lanes running in either direction were empty today. The mere sight of it filled her with dark foreboding.
“Jesus,” Justin muttered from the back seat.
“Yep,” Amber said.
Heather stopped in the middle of the deserted road just before the entrance to the Wal-Mart parking lot. Amber pointed at the store. “I think the lights are on.”
Heather squinted. The giant box superstore stood as the centerpiece in a strip mall. Two rectangular blocks of smaller stores, one on each side, ran perpendicular to the road. Seeing it for the first time on the day they had moved here, she had thought it reminiscent of a king on his throne with his vassals on benches arrayed before him. A chiropractor, a beauty salon, a Chinese restaurant and nearly two dozen other stores stood ready to snatch the shopping dollars Wal-Mart didn’t consume first.
The Last Days of October Page 9