She turned her mind to the past to keep it from playing outside, where a tiring sun cast long shadows over the collection of buildings that had, for a time, been her neighborhood. Comfort existed in memories of sunny days and things that made sense, but most of these memories took place back in Norfolk and circled around to that afternoon last summer, when her father had asked her to spy on her mother. Because of the worms.
Keep them away from my wife.
Not Mom, not your mother, but my wife. The distinction struck her now in a way it hadn’t before. He should have referred to her as Mom, Mommy or your mother. Because she was Amber’s mother. That was her role. The essence of her being. Right?
Nope. She’s his wife. Emphasis on his. That’s how he thinks of her.
“Hey. Can I ask you something?”
Justin stood in the doorway. It had been his idea to save further exploration for tomorrow; they had, he said, experienced enough adventure for one night. What remained of the sun cast shadows over his lanky figure and obscured most of his face. Silhouettes of tree branches reached across his chest.
“Sure. You can come in.”
He hesitated, then stepped inside. He took an immediate sidestep to the left and stood with his back against her closet door. She got the sense he would have stood in the closet if he could have gotten away with it. She had to prompt him to get him speaking. “What is it?”
“Your dad. When does he typically show up?”
“I don’t know. We’ve only been here one night. Why?”
He shrugged and looked down at the carpet. “You’re going to think I’m a total dork.”
“Okay…again, why?”
He took a deep breath and looked up.
“I brought most of my stuff in earlier, but I left my slippers in my truck. My mom got them for me at Christmas a few years ago, last time she ever remembered a holiday. It’s the one useful thing she’s ever done for me. They’re furry, they’re warm and I want them on my feet.”
Amber stared at him. Then she laughed. Moments ago, she wouldn’t have believed such a thing possible, but the absurdity of it struck a chord in her she’d forgotten existed. And she was grateful.
His figure relaxed somewhat and he picked himself up off of the wall. When he stepped closer into the light, she saw him grinning. “It’s stupid, I know,” he said. “I was just, I don’t know…”
“Bored, maybe?”
“Yeah. I mean, this beats the hell out of sitting alone in my apartment, but once the sun starts going down there isn’t a whole lot to do anymore, is there?”
“No, there’s not.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, I think I’ll make it through the night without my furry slippers, if you guys don’t mind me wearing my sneakers in the house. I’m going to go crash out on the couch.”
He turned to leave, but he stopped when she spoke.
“You can hang out here for a little bit, if you’d like. If you want to talk or something.”
He paused. Then he said, “Sure.”
He pulled a chair away from her desk and lowered himself into it. They sat there in silence, he in the chair, she crosslegged on her bed. Then Amber asked, “Do you have anybody that’s going to come to the door for you tonight?”
“My mom. And my ex-girlfriend. My only hope is that they haven’t figured out where I am.”
Amber drew her knees up under her chest and perched her chin between them. “What was she like?”
“Who, my mom?”
“Your ex-girlfriend,” she said.
“Bitchy. You don’t want to hear about Kayleigh.”
“Yes, I do. Internet’s out and there’s no cable. I totally have nothing better to do than to pry into your personal life.”
He sighed and looked up at the ceiling.
“Where to start? I met her in high school. She ran off pretty much all my friends because she had to have all my attention, and if I ever didn’t text her back in, like, half an hour she’d blow up my phone wanting to know where I was. And once all my friends were gone, I didn’t have anybody. I had all this shit going on in my life and only one person to talk to about it. Her.”
“Why’d you break up?”
“Because when my dad got cancer, he ended up in the hospital for several weeks before he finally gave out. Kayleigh gave me a ration of shit about spending so much time over there and leaving her by herself. I was like, are you serious? Are you seriously giving me a hard time about visiting my dying dad in the hospital because you’re lonely? I dumped her ass.”
Shadows covered half his face. Nascent moonlight illuminated the other half. He grinned, but it was a pinched, sarcastic look. She tasted the bitterness in his words.
“What’s crazy is, I kept talking to her. I was actually over at her trailer the day the shit hit the fan around here. That’s why I was in jail. She got mad at me and took a warrant. And even after that, she comes to my door and I’m like, should I just let her in? Just open the door and be done with it? It makes no sense.”
She looked out the window that consumed most of the back wall. The purple sky glowed behind black, naked trees, branches interlaced beyond the glass like some sort of twisted ribcage. Then she said, “I’m worried about my mom.”
He sat in the chair, listening.
“She opened the door last night. She would have let him in, too. Had I not been there she’d have let him suck her dry. She’ll deny it, but I swear to God that’s what she was about to do.”
“Are you worried she’ll let him in tonight?”
“No, but…well, maybe. I’m worried that she’s not thinking straight when it comes to him.”
He let his eyes fall to the carpet and nodded slowly. “I’ve been thinking about your dad, too,” he said. “Your mom said there were others. A bunch of them. Out on the street.”
“I saw them. Out in the yard.”
“But none of them on the porch. He was the only one to come up on the porch and knock on the door.”
“Right.”
He straightened up. His lips were a thin line across the bottom of his face. “And all night, none of these bastards did a thing. Nobody knocked on a window. Nobody came up on the porch.”
“No. Is this important?”
“It is,” he said, “if you think about what you saw in Wal-Mart. Those things were like animals closing in on a kill. But they didn’t finish. They stayed back. They left you alone.”
“Only because you jumped in there with that portable spotlight and saved us. Otherwise, we’d have been…”
“A battery-powered spotlight,” he said. “Electric. A glorified, magnified light bulb.”
“So?”
He leaned forward. “These fucking things aren’t afraid of electric light. I’ve seen it; the jail stays lit up like daytime all night long. I had one standing right out in front of my cell, right underneath a light bar. Why’d the spotlight work, Amber? Why are you still here?”
She blinked. She had no idea.
“Because you’re his,” Justin said. “You’re his daughter and your mom is his wife. You’re still here because he’s got dibs on you guys. Me, I got lucky. Had I gone in there with different girls, I’d still be in that store. You know it.”
She sucked in a chestful of air and held it for several moments. He had to be right. If they reacted to electric light the same way as sunlight, they should have all fried in the jail immediately after their turning. But when she opened her mouth to say this, she said, “You’re wrong.”
“About what part?”
“It’s her,” Amber said. “It’s her, and it’s always been about her. He could care less about me. Did you know that he never asked to speak to me when he was deployed? We would get these calls from Italy or Spain or wherever his ship docked and I would hear Mom ask him, ‘Do you want to talk to Amber?’ She’d say this when it was clear their conversation was winding down, and then she’d hand me the phone and say, ‘Your dad wants to talk to
you.’ I was like, no, he doesn’t. You asked him if he wanted to talk to me and he said yes. He didn’t ask. Because he doesn’t care. Because he doesn’t think about me. I’m just an accessory. I have no memories of him ever doing anything where it was just me and him and not my mom, too. He never took me to a movie or showed me how to fish or how to do this or how to do that, and he didn’t do any of these things because he didn’t give a shit. To him, I was just…there.”
And suddenly she was crying. Justin rose and sat down beside her on the bed. He put an arm around her and held her as she shook. “You know what I think?” she asked. “I think I was just a boat anchor to him. Something he could hang around her neck to keep her in place so that he could be an ass and control her and do whatever and she wouldn’t leave him. Because he’s obsessed. Kids are great to keep women in their place. Get a girl pregnant and in a sense, she’s yours for life.”
He held her until she stopped shaking, then sat with his hands in his lap when she rose and grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her desk. She wiped her nose and discarded the used tissues in the trash can by her chair. Justin studied her thoughtfully.
“What?” She asked.
“It does make sense,” he said. “That he was obsessed. And that we’re still alive.”
She folded her arms. “How so?”
“This town had thousands of people in it before this happened. Now it has three. And it’s safe to assume that everybody else, with few exceptions, has been turned into a vampire. Vampires suck blood. It’s how they live. So not only are there no people, but there are no dogs or cats, either. Which begs the question: now that everyone but us has turned, what are these things eating?”
Amber blinked. She hadn’t thought about that.
“And the answer to that is,” Justin continued, “not much. They sucked the blood out of all the meat in Wal-Mart, and you saw those things—they were skinnier than the extras in a Holocaust movie. They pulled that shit with the lights and the generator because they want to attract victims, because they’re hungry as hell and the pickings have gotten pretty slim around here. And yet, here we are. They had you and your mom surrounded, but they didn’t take you. Not because of some goofy dude with a big flashlight, but because you belong to somebody else. Somebody important. You’ve got his brand on you somehow.”
Brand. He’d used the word brand—like they were cattle. Property.
“Which, if you’re starving, shouldn’t matter.” He nodded, agreeing with his own assessment. “Think of the hungriest you’ve ever been and multiply it to the point where you are acutely aware that your survival depends on you eating something very soon. Picture somebody bringing you a plate with a couple of grilled steaks on it. Now picture yourself not eating it. How does that work? How can it work?”
“I don’t know.”
His eyebrows raised. “If you know that those steaks not only belong to somebody else, but they belong to somebody very important. Somebody who will totally fuck you up if you eat them, and your fear over what they’re going to do to you is strong enough to overcome starvation.”
He watched her as she processed all this. The silence between them crackled with the implications of what he was saying.
“He’s somebody important,” she said. “Very important.”
“Yes,” Justin said. “He’s got dibs on your mom, and he’s got to be the one to take her. Because she belongs to him. Maybe you too, but she definitely belongs to him. And the others have left you guys alone so far because he’s special. Because he’s their leader.”
19.
Heather had gone out drinking. She and three other girls from her unit hit the bars on liberty in Virginia Beach, gaining easy entry despite none of them having ID. The law hadn’t treated underage drinking as harshly back then as it did now; a girl could still find a good time in those days. Especially a girl out of uniform, in tight jeans and a tank top that revealed the contours of her pre-Amber body. Before all the years wore her down.
They drank for free. Riding a buzz financed by the hopes of horny sailors and college boys, they ended up on the beach with a trio of sailors from some aircraft carrier. Her friends hooked up; she didn’t. I’m married, she told them. My husband’s at sea. They respected that, and nobody gave her a hard time. She made it through the night with her liver a little worse for wear but her moral fiber intact.
And that should have been the end of the memory; a fun night out on the town, something she would have done every weekend had she gone to college. It should have been the kind of memory that took the edge off of the choices life had presented to her as it denied her those it provided others. Should have made her smile. But it didn’t, because someone had seen them. And told Mike. And even though three weeks passed before Mike returned to port, he found out about it. Under the ocean for two solid months, and he had still found out about it.
And he slapped her.
In the midst of a colossal fight she didn’t quite understand, he reached out and popped her in the face. She made it through I didn’t do anything wrong and who the hell are you to…and then POW, out came the hand. She reeled from the impact.
“I go to sea,” he growled. He wanted to shout, she knew, but he couldn’t shout. Not in those little apartments crammed so closely together. They’d already had complaints. “I go to sea, I risk my life and what do you do? Huh? You go out to the Lido Inn? A married woman going to bars like some kind of coke whore?”
“I didn’t do anything,” she protested again. Her left cheek stung where his right palm had smacked it. He’d never done this before, struck her physically. It had been a surprise assault, but she had seen his hand coming; she could have grabbed it, twisted it and spun him around like she’d done to scores of drunken sailors. But she’d done nothing. She’d just let him.
“DON’T YOU LIE TO ME!”
His scream came in a hurricane force that propelled her back against the wall of their little kitchen. The calendar where she’d been marking the days to his return fell to the floor. In one swift motion, he raised his fist and punched straight through the cheap drywall next to her head. Her breath, her heart, everything stopped. She stood there, frozen, and waited for him to pull his fist out of the wall and put it through her face.
“Don’t you lie to me,” he repeated. His voice was lower now, but he spoke in a tone like battery acid. “I already know. You and those sluts took a bunch of yahoos out on the beach for…what? Conversation and fellowship?”
She drew in only enough breath to power her vocal chords. “I…didn’t!”
“And why should I believe you? Because you’re so trustworthy? Because you took a bunch of guys out on the beach after getting shitfaced hammered at that fleabag bar, but oh, no, you didn’t fuck anybody?”
Less than an inch separated their noses. She felt him in her head.
“You know what? I do believe you. I know you didn’t do any of that nasty shit, because you can’t lie to me. Because no matter what you say I will always know the truth. Because you’re a shitty liar.”
He stepped back and pulled his fist out of the wall. He retreated into the bathroom alone, where he remained. In the two hours that followed, Heather struggled with the decision of how to spend the rest of her life. She had an opportunity, she realized, to leave. Were she ever to escape his gravitational field, her rockets would never be stronger than right now. He’d done something not only wrong, but bad, very bad; he would understand this, and when he came out of that bathroom to find her gone not only from the house but also his life, he would get it.
More to the point, she understood what he’d done. She had watched this scene before, aboard base in quarters just like these. She had worked enough nights and weekends. She’d seen the bloody noses and blackening eyes; she’d seen the heads tilted forward or to the side, bent with the weight of believing they could achieve nothing better. Some of them were probably right.
All she had to do was pack a suitcase. Yet when Mike em
erged from the bathroom, she hadn’t left. He stared at her from the doorway for a while, looking tired and ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last.
“You should be,” she said.
“I’m not going to hit you again,” he said. “Ever.”
“And if you do, I’ll leave you.”
He nodded. He shuffled over to the couch and sat down on the other end. His bandaged right hand looked like a Q-tip in his lap. “Fair enough,” he said. “Are we all good now?”
He had slapped her. Punched a hole in the wall. And he wasn’t even drunk. “Yeah,” she said. “Of course we are.”
She lay on the couch now, the Ruger at the ready on the coffee table beside her. She understood that it wouldn’t save her if Mike’s new friends gained entry to the house, but it made her feel better and so she kept it nearby. Upstairs, Amber was silent—exhausted, probably dead asleep. Justin had occupied the couch, but Heather had kicked him out and sent him upstairs into the guest room. Alone now, she lay on her side and stared at the dead eye of the television set. She would have given her left arm for a glass of red wine and some Friends reruns just now. Something to take her mind off of all this.
A sudden noise outside made her sit up. Boards creaking on the porch. Full dark out there now, there could be only one person who would be doing that.
Knock…knock…knock.
Instinctively, she grabbed the Ruger. With her free hand, she reached forward and pulled the blind slats apart enough to where she could see outside.
October wind blowing down the street disturbed the leaves on the ground and ripped stubborn hangers-on from the skinny branches to which they clung with such tenacity. The vivid autumn palette of gold and orange and bronze had spoiled with the disappearance of the sun, and now the color receptors in her eyes detected nothing but different shades of gray. And among these shades stood a dozen or more dark, skinny figures. Standing still, like ice sculptures. Waiting for something.
Orders, she thought. These are his. These are his troops.
The Last Days of October Page 12