Probably not, she thought. But she had to try.
What if there’s no one? What if you truly are it, at least in this town? Are you going to make them stay here forever? Or do you risk their lives taking them on the run?
“Car,” Amber said.
Heather braked. Ahead, two driverless Deep Creek Police Department cruisers sat nose-to-nose. They blocked the road in both directions, the trunk and bumper of each blocking what little space existed between the road and trees. If they wanted to continue, they’d have to do it on foot.
“How far is it from here?” she asked.
“Not far,” Justin said. His voice was taut with hope and excitement. And, Heather thought, just a little bit of fear. “One more turn beyond this and you’re there.”
Heather put the Durango in park but left the engine running. The red light on the dashboard indicating that long-ignored emissions problem—whatever the hell it was—flickered but didn’t go out. “I’d prefer not to,” Heather said, “in case we need to get out of here fast. But I don’t see any alternative.”
“These cars are here for a reason,” Justin said.
“It’s because this is where everyone went,” Amber breathed excitedly. Her face glowed. “Everybody came up here and they put the cop cars here to block the road. You know, for security. This is it! We should have come here yesterday instead of screwing around at Wal-Mart!”
Heather stared at the police cars. Their placement was deliberate, that much was obvious. But they bothered her. She felt music played out of tune, something wrong. Were this a true barricade, she thought, it would have been manned. And if a colony of survivors waited in the high school just around the bend…
We’d have seen them by now. They’d have been sending out patrols. Like us.
Her stomach roiled with the acidic realization that whoever had sought refuge in Justin’s old high school was probably dead.
“Let’s go!” Amber exclaimed, throwing open the passenger door.
Heather reached out and grabbed her arm. “Wait,” she said.
Halfway out of the truck already, Justin drew himself back inside and listened.
“We don’t know what we’re going to find up there,” Heather said. “And we don’t want a repeat of our little shopping trip yesterday. If there’s anybody there, we’re not going inside. They come out to us, in the sun. The full sun, not the shadows beside the building. They can call to us and wave at us all they want, but if they won’t come out in the sun, that tells us all we need to know. Right?”
Amber’s joyous glow had collapsed. But she nodded again. “Right,” she sighed.
Heather checked the Ruger and adjusted it in her waistband. “Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”
At the point where the road wound out of the woods, they stepped off the pavement and sought what concealment the naked trees offered. Dead leaves crunched and twigs broke beneath their feet; to Heather, they sounded like a herd of elephants tromping through the woods. With Amber and Justin shrinking behind her, she crouched behind the trunk of a great white oak and stared at the sprawling single-story complex across the parking lot. Cars, trucks and minivans filled the lot nearly to capacity.
People had come here.
She squinted at the building. The stars and stripes flew atop the flagpole, the North Carolina flag hoisted just below it. Beneath that, Deep Creek High School sat in utter stillness and silence.
“Looks deserted,” Justin said dejectedly.
“You don’t know that,” Amber said. “They could just be hanging out inside.
She watched, listened. After several minutes, she stepped out of the trees, cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled, “HEY! IS THERE ANYBODY HERE?”
Her voice died halfway across the parking lot. She lowered her hands and waited. When her squinting revealed no movement in the parking lot or outside the school, she took a deep breath and stepped out of the trees.
“What are you doing?” Amber asked.
“Stay back.”
Above her, the sun warmed her hair as her feet swished over brown, dormant grass. She walked with her lips pursed, muscles tensed. She left the grass and entered the parking lot, a position that afforded her now a look around the right side of the building at the practice fields and the football stadium. No students played ball out there now. No one walked around outside, even though the air inside the building had to be stagnant now with no ventilation.
They came here because there’s safety in numbers. They came here for safety and security. And then, one night, somebody opened a door.
“Careful,” Justin called out.
Heather swallowed, and her lips trembled. She stood now on the concrete causeway that led up to the main entrance of the school. Black windows stared back at her. In the plate glass covering the front of the building, she could just about see herself reflected there. Unkempt, messy. She looked like a soccer mom from Hell.
She walked around the side of the building, eyes scanning the windows for any sign of movement. The afternoon sun shimmered off the glass. Amber and Justin followed, obediently hanging back.
“Hello! My name is Heather Palmer! If there’s someone in there, please come outside!”
The windows betrayed nothing. Around on the right, the doorways leading to the practice fields remained shut.
“Is there anybody there? I won’t hurt you! I come in peace! Please answer me!”
She realized she was screaming now, not yelling. Screaming herself hoarse, the bubbling despair that ran constantly in the background of her mind now threatening to lurch forward and take over. She felt then like a diver who had surfaced only to find the boat gone. Abandoned and alone in the ocean with nothing below her but the black depths and the creatures that lived there.
A hand fell on her shoulder, and she jumped. Justin.
“Use the gun,” he said. “No one’s going to hear you standing out here yelling. Fire a shot.”
She bit her lower lip. But she turned around, drew the Ruger and fired it once into the air. The report whipcracked across the grounds like a peal of thunder and echoed off the brick walls of the building. She watched and waited.
Nothing.
She turned to face Justin and Amber. “There’s nobody here,” she said. “I think there was, once. But not anymore. Somebody…”
All at once, both sets of eyes widened and both jaws dropped. Heather’s next thought died in her throat as she turned. And saw it.
The vampire was rail-thin, and with its mouth closed it more resembled a concentration camp survivor than a monster. Clothes hanging on its wasted frame hinted that it had been a man once, but that day had long since passed. Now, its mottled skin surrounded a pair of black eyes sunken into its skull and its arms protruded like sticks from the great sail of its shirt. It stared at her. Paralyzed, Heather stared back.
It bared its fangs. It screeched.
It charged.
The building’s high roof cast a long shadow over the ribbon of sidewalk that stretched from the building to the entrance to the practice fields. Even with the sun blocked, though, the thing began smoking the minute it hit the crisp air. But like Harley the dog, it kept coming. Black patches on its skin grew, its body charring in the sun.
Behind it, the door banged open again and the school discharged a tide of its companions. Skinny, starved and utterly mindless, a sea of black eyes and skinny limbs.
“Run!” she shouted.
Amber and Justin ran. She emptied her magazine in the direction of the charging vampires and then she ran too, hair streaming in the wind behind her. Both younger people vaulted the waist-high fence surrounding the field complex. Heather tried to do the same, but she stumbled and fell upon landing. She scrambled to her feet and followed her daughter and Justin in their mad dash across the baseball field and onto the soccer field beyond it. Justin looked back over his shoulder, slowed and then stopped. Lungs on the brink of explosion, Heather followed suit.
�
��I think we’re okay,” he panted. “Look.”
Nothing chased them anymore. A few had made it as far as the fence, but the majority hadn’t. Crisped by the sun, they lay still. Their bodies reminded her of old pictures of Civil War dead laying strewn about the battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania. She stared in shock and amazement. She tried to count the dead but she couldn’t.
“Like a bunch of lemmings,” Justin said. “Right out into the goddamned sun.”
They came at us. They came at me.
Just then, a realization struck her with a force that made her vision swim. She thought she would pass out. Instead, she just vomited.
Amber rested a hand on her back and held it there until she had finished. When her stomach finished convulsing, she stood and spat on the grass. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, feeling the warmth of the sun that shone down upon her now like the understanding burning in her head.
“They were starving,” Amber said. “Look at them.”
“You’ll do about anything if you get hungry enough,” Justin observed.
“Right,” Heather said. “And in this case, all these things charged out into the sun. To get me.”
They blinked at her, uncomprehending.
“I’m supposed to be his,” she said. “But they came for me anyway. He’s supposed to be the one that takes me, but they disobeyed him. But that’s not the problem. The problem is…”
“…that they didn’t give a shit,” Justin finished for her. “They didn’t give a shit about your husband, and they didn’t give a shit about the sun. They wanted to eat.”
“They broke the rules,” Heather said. “Because they’re starving. And he doesn’t control all of them. It’s only a matter of time before they all tell him to fuck off. And they come inside to get us.”
“So what do we do?” Amber asked.
Heather swallowed. She looked at the charred bodies and then to the sky. The sun had already begun its afternoon decline and sunk towards the tree line with a speed she could almost see. They didn’t have enough time to make Fort Bragg this evening.
But if they hurried, they could get back up into Caswell. Way out in the country. Where they’d sat outside and roasted marshmallows over campfires and nothing, not so much as a bitey squirrel, had bothered them.
“We’re leaving,” she said. “Today.”
22.
Back at the house, Heather heard a thumping noise in the living room and looked down at the carpeted floor. It sounded like
He’s beating on the joists. He knows what you have in mind and he’s telling you you’d better not do that.
Now she paused on her way out with another load of camping gear and clothing. She stared at the sky, and then down at her watch. 4:30. How much sunlight did they have left?
Not enough.
“Should we just stay put for the night?” Amber asked. “It’s getting late.”
“I know,” Heather replied, shoving her burden into the back of the Durango. “That’s why we need to move faster.”
“The game’s changing,” Justin said, pulling a cooler filled with God knew what.
“We made it in the woods,” Heather said, “because none of these things knew we were there. We need to get out of their range. Out in the country, where there weren’t many people to start with. We go up there, we’ll be just fine.”
“What if we’re not just fine? What if we end up in some other vampires’ territory and they turn us?”
Heather had tucked the Ruger into her waistband before loading the truck. She felt it pressing now against her skin, a hard metallic presence that spoke of things she preferred not to consider.
Count your rounds, she had thought. Make sure you save at least three.
“That’s not going to happen,” she said. “Now come on, help us. We don’t have much time.”
They forgot some things, Heather felt sure of it. She had never gone on vacation and not made at least one trip to the nearest Wal-Mart. This afternoon, she had grabbed items as they flashed into her head, because they didn’t have time for a list. From the position of the sun, she wasn’t sure they had time to do any of this at all.
“Got everything?” she asked as Justin and Amber climbed into the truck.
“I think so,” Amber said.
“Drive,” Justin said.
She started the engine. When the idle settled, the Check Engine light remained glowing, reminding her that something was rotten in Denmark. But the Durango protested not at all when she dropped it into reverse and pulled out of the driveway. The fuel gauge promised a half tank of gas, more than enough to get them up the road to where they’d started all this—where they had been, for a time, safe.
She blew through stop signs and dead traffic lights without a thought and charged through downtown like she was being chased. The city limits sign whipped by as she emerged into the county on Highway 49. The turnoff to the high school flashed past, and then the Shell station where they’d picked up their last load of provisions. She hit the open road and increased her speed to eighty miles per hour, only slowing for the soft curves where the road avoided one patch of land to traverse another.
To the west, the sun continued its slow descent towards the tree line. Shortly, the shadows would lengthen. And the light would begin to fade.
I’ll stay up as long as I can, the blood orange in the sky said. But even I can’t stop this rock from turning.
Just hang in there a little while longer, she thought. I just need to get up to that old house, clear the place, make sure we’re the only creatures in there. I don’t need you to stay up all night, just another twenty minutes. Twenty-five on the outside. Can you do that for me?
She glanced at the clock. Knowing it was wrong, she pressed down on the accelerator.
And the engine started to miss.
“What’s happening?” Amber asked.
Heather stared at the dashboard. Temperature, battery, oil pressure, all good. The pesky CHECK ENGINE light, the one that had been glowing for days now, stared back at her.
You stupid bitch, it said. Did you think I was just whistling Dixie?
Yes. She had thought it nothing more than some silly emissions problem, nothing to worry about in a world where apparently nobody else was driving much and she enjoyed slim chances of getting pulled over when her inspection and registration expired. Check engine, engine’s still there, right under the hood where it needs to be, all good, okay, let’s go.
“You piece of shit!” she growled. “Do not do this! No, no, NO!”
Fuck you, the Durango said. Feed me cheap gas for ten years and IGNORE MY CHECK ENGINE LIGHT and expect us to be all good?
The truck began to jerk, as if some invisible, hateful idiot had crawled down on the floorboards to play with the brake pedal. The tachometer needle did a crazy dance, jumped into the red zone and then crashed to zero as the motor stalled out.
“You can’t do this!”
But it could. And it did. With a metallic whine, it ground to a halt in the middle of the highway.
For a moment, no one said anything. They sat in the truck, the silence broken only by the ticking of the Durango’s deceased motor and the pounding of their own hearts.
Justin leaned between the two front seats and said, “If you don’t get this thing started again, we are ass-fucked.”
Amber looked over at Heather, eyes wide. Her face was that of a scared child looking to her mother for answers. Answers that the mother didn’t have, decisions that the mother couldn’t make. Important decisions.
Should I stay or should I go? Stay with the vehicle or go seek shelter elsewhere?
She studied the landscape around her. By her reckoning, they had stopped just over the Morgan-Caswell line, a good twenty miles from where they needed to be. Empty fields lined the highway on either side. On her right, a dilapidated farmhouse stared at them with glassless windows. Great holes in the roof exposed its rotting frame and testified to the decades
that had passed since the last human spent the night there. It wouldn’t serve their needs for even temporary shelter; even if an army of vampires didn’t come pouring in through the gaps where the windows had been, the whole works could come crashing down on them during the night.
Up ahead, though, she could make out the outlines of a squat but modernish brick ranch home. Hopefully uninhabited.
That’s it, she thought. That’s where we’ll go.
“Grab what you can,” she said. “Weapons, a little food, whatever you’ll need just for tonight. And make it fast.”
23.
The brick ranch stood farther away than she’d estimated. They broke into a run at the end, only slowing when they reached the end of the long gravel driveway that led from the road to a delta of gray rock marking the beginnings of the front yard. A set of four depressions in the gravel before the garage suggested the recent presence of an automobile that had since departed.
You better hope they departed, she thought grimly. Because if they’re still in there, you’re in for a rough night.
“No cross on the door,” Amber observed. “That’s encouraging, right?”
“Maybe,” Justin said. “Or maybe they were among the first to get turned and never had a chance to go get the spray paint. Do you think they’re home?”
“I’m about to find out.” Heather handed the Ruger to Amber, who accepted it reluctantly. Heather dropped her backpack and took one of the sharpened broom handle stakes they had carried away from home. “I’m going to clear this place,” she said. “If you hear me yelling…”
“Run,” Amber said.
“Right. But don’t go back to the truck. See those woods? Run that way. Go through them if you can, find a place to hide. Okay?”
They both nodded.
She kissed Amber on the forehead and turned to face the front door.
The door wasn’t locked. This didn’t surprise her; out in the country, many people didn’t lock their doors. She’d had several friends in high school who had never possessed keys to their own homes, since their parents never locked them.
The Last Days of October Page 14