The one on the end, a black-eyed demon, smiled and revealed its fangs.
Mom screamed.
The vampire leapt. In an instant, Amber raised the lighter and aimed the wasp spray through the flame. A solid jet of fire lashed out and struck the creature mid-air. It screeched and fell to the floor. Inert now, it burned with the intensity of gasoline-soaked kindling. The other two tried to draw back, but they had committed to their charge. Amber swept the makeshift flamethrower across their bodies, setting them ablaze. They caught easily.
Lighting flashed from the barrel of Mom’s pistol. Something heavy fell off the shelf behind her head.
“Paper!” Mom barked. “Set it on fire! Burn everything!”
Bathroom tissue, napkins and paper towels lined shelves stretching into the darkness into which they’d have to go if they ever hoped to reach the door. Mom shoved her and she charged down the aisle, shooting flame in short bursts. Bales of paper products caught fire easily, revealing things that squealed and screeched before falling backwards off the shelves. Something forward, right in her path, and she torched it without thinking, moving past its writhing carcass.
Go, go, GO!
Behind her, Mom’s pistol whipcracked again and again. Her left hand, the one with the lighter, exploded in sudden pain and she dropped it. She reached into her pocket and came out with the other one, a cooler one. She flicked the wheel once, twice, three times before it caught. The little flame licked up just beyond her throbbing left thumb and she swept fire down the aisle on either side.
Everything burned now. Fire consumed the toilet paper, the tissues and towels. They emerged from the paper goods aisle and she caught movement out of the corner of her left eye. Another one of the screeching bonebags fell and in the light of its immolation she saw what stood behind it.
Dozens of them my God they’re everywhere
She became conscious now of the growing lightness of the wasp spray can. In just a few seconds, she’d be out.
“Amber!”
Charging forward, Mom pointed the pistol in her direction. She pulled the trigger and it flashed once. Something whizzed past her head. Amber turned to see a dark shape fall to the ground, try to get up.
She aimed the wasp spray and torched it.
More of them, charging forward now from the grocery section where they’d sprung their trap. Running from Electronics, streaming through Clothing. Cutting them off along the main aisle that ran to the entryway, to daylight, to safety. Surrounding them.
The pistol clicked empty.
Amber cast a stream of burning wasp spray, much shorter now than it had been, across the racks of clothing through which she heard those things coming. Nothing caught.
The can sputtered, sighed and quit.
The vampires formed a ring around them, a circle broken only by the paper goods aisle, blazing now in full force. They didn’t like the fire and shied from it, but this afforded her and Mom no protection and no way out because it was hot. She felt it all the way over here. They couldn’t go in there; they’d roast, or die from inhaling the smoke slowly building in the store’s now-unventilated space. And even if they could go there, even if they could make it through the heat and the smoke, the only way out of the store lay in the back. Through those dark storerooms.
Mom pulled her close. Her breath was hot and fast on her neck.
“I love you,” Mom whispered.
“I love you, too.”
When the generator cut off, Justin only had time to blink twice before the lights died and plunged him into darkness. His stomach turned to concrete, his blood to ice. He veered in the dark and collided with a shelf of canned goods, hard. Bright pain bloomed in his face, but he ignored it. He had bigger problems.
Navigating by memory, he made his way back to his cart. He had nearly found a handhold on the sheer cliff face of panic when Heather screamed, “Justin!”
No—she didn’t scream. She shrieked, a cry of utter terror barely recognizable as the voice of a grown woman.
He shoved his hands into the cart, felt around for the box he knew was there. The handheld spotlight. Vampires had to operate in the dark. Had to.
They operated just fine at the jail.
Those were fluorescent lights. This portable spotlight wasn’t fluorescent. This was the real deal, the real motherfucking deal. Electric, yeah, but not fluorescent, and that had to count for something.
Goddamn, where was it?
Heather screamed again. There came a hiss and a whoosh and the quality of the darkness seemed to change then, as if someone had flipped a light switch far away. Explosive gunfire.
His hands closed around the box and he ripped it free of the peanut butter and jelly and canned tuna and beans and everything else he’d thrown in the basket on his mad shopping spree. His fingers tore at the cardboard. Staples pierced his skin, but he barely felt this as he ripped the spotlight from its packing. Batteries were supposedly included. Hopefully they were already installed.
A terrible mewling screech cut through the air. He winced, but his fingers found the light’s pistol grip. He pointed it up ahead, pulled the trigger. One million candlepower erupted with the power of a small sun.
A shelf of Bush’s Baked Beans emerged from the darkness, but nothing with fangs leapt with it. In the near distance, Heather hollered something about burning everything. Justin zeroed in on this voice and ran along the aisle, the beam jiggling before him.
God please God please God please
He emerged from the canned goods aisle onto the main thoroughfare that separated the grocery section from everything else. The square of sunlight signifying the presence of the front door stood just beyond the produce section, nothing between him and escape but a few pumpkins and bagged apples. He turned away from this to face the back of the store, which glowed now with orange fire. The gun fired, something screeched back there and in the flickering light, Justin saw Amber with what looked like a flamethrower. Wherever the hell she’d gotten one of those.
Go. They’re done for. Get gone before you are, too.
“AMBER!” he shouted. “HEATHER!”
The figures reacted not at all to his voice, and he understood that they didn’t hear him, couldn’t hear him. Skittering noises ahead and to the right, more of those things approaching from elsewhere in the store. He saw Amber and her mother as silhouettes against the flames.
And then he couldn’t see them at all. Other figures, spindly figures, hunched over with the weight of what had happened to them, stepped in the way.
No.
A clear shot to the front door lay right behind him.
Take it. This damn light is no good and you know it those things will bite you and then you’ll be just like them so GET OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW
He charged forward.
Break her neck, something dark and hopeless in Heather’s core urged. Don’t let her go like this.
But she couldn’t. The girl stood tall as she now and had to bend to get her face into that spot between Heather’s neck and shoulder where she had sought comfort as an infant. Heather felt her trembling.
“I’m sorry,” Heather whispered, voice breaking. Running footsteps fell on her ears as more of those things hurried to the feast. “I…”
Before she could finish, bright light exploded before her face. Vampires squealed.
She opened her eyes. Justin charged out of the darkness, brandishing what looked like a cartoon version of a flashlight. He pivoted with a dancer’s grace and swept the beam all around them. Dark, skinny figures mewled and raised their hands to cover their faces. Hope bubbled in Heather’s chest as they backed away from this new threat.
Justin’s eyes were wide, crazy. He bellowed a prehistoric battle cry.
The vampires screeched and shuffled. Unlike Mike, these things didn’t talk.
They’ve degenerated, they’ve had nothing to eat for days and they’re wasting away.
Heather grabbed Amber’s shirt in one hand, the e
mpty pistol in the other. The main aisle clear now, she pulled them in the direction of Justin and the door. “Go,” she gasped, barely able to speak through the pinhole airway that had been her throat.
They ran along the main aisle, past the dark blocks of freezer cases and the expanse of spoiling produce. Justin covered their rear, swinging the spotlight like a laser. The creatures stayed back.
With the generator off, the sliding doors didn’t slide. But Heather, still shaking with adrenaline, had no trouble forcing them open. Outside, the air tasted sweet and crisp, like a perfect apple. Amber collapsed against the side of the truck, panting and gulping. Justin took two steps into the sunlight, looked around for a moment and then doubled over. He retched.
Heather looked behind her. The entry doors were solid black squares that made her colder than autumn could manage on its own. Still not feeling safe, she opened the passenger door and shoved Amber into it. “Get in,” she said, “we need to go.”
“They set us up,” Justin said. “Like we’re deer. They’ve been tricking people. They hunt.”
“Get in the truck,” Heather said. “We need to get out of here. Now.”
18.
Amber recalled their small yard at the house on the naval base in Norfolk. The Navy dressed its homes identically, just as it did its sailors. Her friend Joy, who had moved from Pensacola last year, said that for the first week or two she could only identify her house by her mom’s car sitting in the driveway. She lived in fear that her parents would drive off somewhere and she’d have to walk around the neighborhood like a dumbass until they got home. Everything looked the same.
Each of the townhouses had a small flower bed and patch of grass up front. Senior enlisted like Dad got end lots or one of the single-family units standing alone on postage stamp lots. As he transferred from command to command on his way up the ladder, the Palmers had moved from a middle unit to an end unit and finally, when he made Chief Petty Officer, a detached home. This came with not only bigger bedrooms, but a lawn large enough to justify the purchase of a gas-powered mower. So Dad had gone out and bought one with mental problems.
“That thing giving you a hard time?” he asked, stepping out of the house.
Amber stood. Old grass clippings stuck to her bare arms and legs and dangled from her hair. She clapped her hands and tried to wipe them away.
“I can handle it.” She’d had a devil of a time with it, cursing its obstinance as she adjusted screws, tested springs. She had removed the shroud and sanded away what she considered an inordinate amount of rust on the flywheel. In the end, though, the mower simply hadn’t had any gas. She only discovered this moments ago, after screwing with it for the better part of thirty minutes. “I just adjusted a few things and topped off the tank. Figure it’ll start now.”
“Good job, li’l lady,” he said in his best John Wayne. “Now go inside and make me some pie!”
“Whatever!”
He chuckled. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his denim shorts. He wore a UNC tee-shirt—even though he’d never gone to college—tucked in at the waist, and a dark blue baseball cap from the U.S.S. Albany, his ship. He looked young for a man standing on the brink of retirement. “Think you can handle all this stuff while I’m gone?”
“Done it before.”
“You have.”
Silence ensued. Amber knelt and pressed the rubber primer button beneath the carburetor. Cold fuel ran beneath her thumb. Behind her, Dad leaned against one of the wooden posts supporting the roof of the carport. Amber felt him watching. She wondered if he had been watching from inside the house and knew that he was about to leave his kingdom with a princess that had spent half an hour of her life tinkering with and cussing at a lawnmower that just needed gas.
“There’s something else I’d like you to do for me while I’m gone,” Dad said at last. “If you don’t mind.”
Amber stood again. “Sure. What?”
“I’d like you to keep an eye on your mother.”
“Of course.”
“No. I mean…” He picked himself up off the pole and walked out into the driveway, removing his cap and rubbing the closely-shaven stubble of hair covering his scalp.
“How do I say this?” he asked, eyes closed.
Amber waited.
Finally, he replaced the cap. He stood for a moment with his back to her, staring at something invisible across the street. Then he turned.
“Your mom’s a pretty woman,” he said. “And she’s young. I know you think we’re both old as dirt, but we’re not even forty yet. Some ladies are just having their first kid at her age.”
Amber looked at the ground. She kicked uncomfortably at a chunk of old grass that had fallen from the mower deck. “Um…okay.”
“Women get lonely. They like having a man around. They might joke and talk about how great it is to get away from us for a while when we go out on a cruise, how submariners are the best husbands in the world because they go off and you don’t have to talk to them for weeks on end. But when we’re gone, they get lonely. So they look for company.”
“You think Mom screws around on you when you’re gone?”
“No. I didn’t say that.”
But by the way his face turned red, Amber knew that yes, he had said that. And if he hadn’t said it, he’d meant it. He wanted her to spy on her mother.
“Good,” she said, “because she doesn’t. She goes to the store, she reads books, she watches TV. That’s it. Sometimes she eats too much and then feels guilty and goes to the gym. But that’s it. I’m serious, Dad, it blows my mind how she can do what she does and not get bored out of her skull…”
He held up both hands. “Great,” he said. “That’s great. I believe you, and I’m glad. Okay? But there’s stuff going on with people our age that high school kids can’t understand. And you might not know it when you see it.”
“There’s nothing to see.” She felt suddenly dirty in a way that grass clippings and lawnmower dust couldn’t manage. Just having this conversation felt like a betrayal. “She wouldn’t know how to cheat even if she wanted to. Which she doesn’t. All she does is wait for you to come home.”
“She’s hitting a difficult age. And this is a strange time for our family. We’re about to hit the point where there is no normal. A storm, if you will. Things fall out of place in storms. People fall out of place, too. Get swept away from where they should be, where they need to be. Suddenly, anything goes.”
He looked to the house. Amber followed his gaze and saw him staring at the window to the master bedroom, where Mom lay napping.
“Your friends are kids,” he said, “and they’re single. Boys can just walk up to you, flirt with you or whatever, and ask for your phone number. They’re direct, because they can be. That’s how it is at your age. You get on towards forty, when pretty much everybody’s married, it gets different.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Women are targets, okay? And women your mom’s age tend to forget that, especially if they’ve been off the market for a long time. They forget how things work, and so they’re not on the lookout. And they fall victim to worms.”
Amber’s eyebrows knit together.
Worms
He nodded. “Every cruise there’s at least two or three sailors has it happen to their family. Guys try to jump in bed with your wife when you’re gone. Any woman can fall victim to a worm. Because worms are small and low, people don’t see them. Don’t know they’re there until it’s too late.”
He hadn’t taken his eyes off the master bedroom window. Amber realized he wasn’t talking to just her anymore.
“Women get lonely,” he continued, “and so they meet these nice guys, helpful guys. Friendly guys. You might hear her one day talking about Joe or Herb or whatever from the gym or some class, something funny he said. He’s just a friend. Nothing to worry about.”
Amber looked down. Dead grass danced in a hot August wind at her feet.
&nbs
p; “Then you notice she’s talking on the phone with him. Does it during the day, right out in the open. Man’s going through a divorce or a breakup, something he needs help with, and so he opens up to her and leans on her for support. And she listens to this shit. Because she’s lonely.
“Then he starts coming over. Maybe he’s got kids and he brings them. Maybe not, maybe he comes alone. But now they talk in person, and they talk a lot. They laugh a lot. And then, suddenly, out of the blue, you don’t see him anymore. You don’t hear about him, and you never see her on the phone with him. You know why?”
Amber didn’t answer.
“Because now they’re fucking.”
She recoiled like she’d opened a container in the refrigerator to find some rotten, months-old meat that no one had known was there. “Okay, that is, like, so nasty. You guys are married!”
The corners of his mouth lifted, but his eyes didn’t rise with them. The brim of his ship cap cast a shadow over his face. “Oh, that doesn’t mean anything these days, baby doll. Not around here. This is a Navy town. Place is crawling with worms. In the old days, the ships were made of wood and worms ate their way into the hulls. They weakened the ships, weakened the fleet. But now the ships are made of steel, so the worms had to go somewhere else. They went ashore. And now they work on our families.”
He reached for his hip pocket then. He had quit smoking years ago but still reached for his cigarettes when something bothered him. Like this.
“I’m not asking you to spy on her,” he said. “But if you see a worm, pull him out of the dirt. Introduce yourself. Ask him if he knows your daddy. You see your mom acting funny, call her on it. Ask her who’s on the phone. Just shine the light, Amber. Worms like dirt, the deeper the better. Light makes them uncomfortable. So shine it. Keep them away from my wife.”
Amber lay on her bed, fully clothed, shoes on. She had considered changing into a sweatsuit or something more bed-worthy, but the mere act of unbuttoning her jeans made her feel vulnerable and unprepared. And it was cold in here now, the temperature in her room sinking with the onset of night.
The Last Days of October Page 11