The parking spaces before these smaller stores stood empty. A smattering of vehicles filled the spaces closest to Wal-Mart itself. Heather followed the invisible beam shooting from Amber’s finger all the way to the lights burning atop the lampposts nearest the store. Barely noticeable beneath the noonday sun, the security lights mounted on the store blazed, too. Heather would have missed it on her own.
“I thought the power was supposed to be out,” Amber said.
“Generator,” Heather said. “So they don’t lose everything in power outages. Must have kicked on when the power went out.”
“That’s a good sign, right? That the generator is still running? Surely there’s somebody in there maintaining it?”
“Yeah,” Heather said. “It’s a really good sign.”
She pulled into the parking lot, then whipped around to where the windshield faced the road.
“What are you doing?” Amber asked.
“Being smart,” Heather replied. She put the truck in park and ejected the magazine from the grip of the Ruger. Amber staring at her from the passenger seat, she loaded three more rounds to replace the ones expended the night before. “When I get out, I want one of you in the driver’s seat, ready to go.”
“I want to come in,” Amber said.
“You can. Just as soon as I check it out and make sure it’s safe. If you hear shots, you go. If somebody other than me comes out, go. If ten minutes passes and I’m still not out and you don’t see anybody, go. Do not come looking for me. Is that clear?”
“Why don’t you give me the gun and let me go check it out?” Justin asked. “You can stay out here with your daughter.”
“Why, because you’re a man?”
Justin blinked at her.
“I know I look like a soccer mom, but I can almost guarantee you I’m better with a gun than you are. Unless you’ve gone through military police training, too.”
He closed his mouth.
“Ten minutes,” she said to Amber. “And keep your eyes open.”
And with that, she turned and began her trek across the blacktop.
Nobody came out to greet her as she approached the store. The autumn air, chilly and crisp, raised the hairs on the back of her neck. She stood on the broad sidewalk that ran the length of the building and squinted through the glass. Inside, lights burned as they always had every time she’d ever come here. No signs of life. Nothing moved.
She stepped forward and the doors slid open with an electric hiss. The building seemed to be inviting her in.
Come inside, it said.
She passed through an entryway where carts stood in interlocked lines, waiting for shoppers. A second set of sliding doors hissed open and she stepped into the store. To her left, a shelf packed with Halloween decorations reached for the ceiling. In front of her, a giant cardboard bin held pumpkins for sale, while the deserted cash registers stretched off in a line to her right. Heart thumping, she scanned the area for any signs of life.
Nothing.
She moved towards the registers to her right, looking down the aisles and keeping her back to the wall. Overhead, speakers played elevator music that she had never really noticed in here before now. Beneath the music, a machine-like hum that reminded her of riding in a car on the interstate.
Generator, she thought. She took a deep breath and yelled at top volume, “IS THERE ANYONE HERE?”
No one answered. She stepped forward to a cash register, grabbed the telephone receiver hanging on the pole beside it and pushed the intercom button. Her voice flooded the store.
“My name is Heather Palmer. Is there anybody in here? Please respond!”
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, thin
gs 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.
17.
“You don’t know what deer corn is?”
In one of her halting attempts to get to know people in Deep Creek, she had asked the guy who sat beside her in Introductory Psychology, a stocky boy who wore a Tim McGraw concert T-shirt and a Realtree camouflage cap, what he’d done over the weekend. He had worked all the time, he said, then took a little bit of Sunday afternoon to throw down deer corn.
She said she didn’t know what deer corn was, or why anyone would throw it.
The boy—man, she supposed, they were all adults here now and this one wore a wedding ring—chuckled. “It’s for hunting,” he said. “You pick a place, then you get you a big old bag of corn. Crappy corn, like pig feed. Pour a little pile of the stuff, then come back every so often and pour it again. Deer like this stuff, so they get used to coming to the same spot to eat it. Then you get up in your deer stand and wait. Eventually, one of them deer’s going to come around and you can pop him.”
“Like a trap,” she said.
“Exactly. Deer have to eat. And they’ll go wherever they can get chow the easiest.”
She stood now frozen in a darkness as impenetrable as if the Devil had plucked out her eyes. Panic rose in her throat, borne on a wave of bile that stank and burned. Her head swam from the sudden jolt of adrenaline, but she couldn’t move.
A storeroom door squealed on its hinges and feet shuffled across the floor. Blind fear overtook her and her mind began turning as dark as her vision.
“Amber!” Mom, invisible. Behind her. The sound of that voi
ce climbing the rungs of fear did something to her and she jolted, sucking in a chestful of air. She felt around in her cart until her hands closed on a triple pack of cigarette lighters. She tore open the pack, navigating by feel. One fell clattering back into the cart, but she retained the others and stuffed one in her pocket. She lit the other one. Instantly, a tiny oasis of orange light pushed back the dark.
Her mother stood beside the cart, looking like a vampire herself in the unnatural shadows. She held the pistol, that useless pistol that would not help them. “Justin!”
“It’s a trap!” he yelled. “Run!”
Amber blinked. On the shelf beside her, rows of wasp spray, roach trays and other household pest control items stood at the ready for purchasers who would never come. Amber grabbed a can of Raid. She flicked off the protective plastic lid that covered the spray button.
Close by, feet shuffled along the floor. Dairy aisle, the cases lining the back wall of the grocery section. Damn things were flanking them. Stabbing in from both ends of the aisle, like pincers.
Mom pulled her backwards, as if to retreat in the direction they’d come, but she jerked forward. “No!” she hissed. “This way!”
Abandoning the cart and everything in it, they moved around the endcap in the direction of the nauseating stench of rotten meat. She heard a shuffling, a crackling and a crinkling. She looked up.
One, two, three of them crouched atop the shelf of bleach and toilet bowl cleaners. Normal people would have collapsed it, but these had finished with normality long ago. They barely looked human now, white and unclothed. Something dark
Blood
coated their naked chests, which showed ribs like the keys of xylophones. Bones poked through leathery skin at every possible point.
The Last Days of October Page 10