They had lived without fear in those days.
She pushed the door open with her foot and entered cautiously. The front door opened into the living room, and she found herself standing in a virtual carbon copy of her grandmother’s home in Wilmington. Like that one, this had a kitchen located right behind the living room and a hallway shooting off to one side, ostensibly towards the bedrooms. Hints of mothballs riding on the cold and stagnant air reminded her of her grandmother’s house, too.
Shadows lay everywhere. Dark spots stacked atop each other to create pockets of night under tables, beside chairs and couches. She looked through the living room and into the kitchen, eyes lighting upon the door that probably led to the garage.
She cleared her throat. Her hands tightened on the makeshift stake as she called out, “Hello? Is anybody home?”
Nothing.
She moved in a semicircle through the living room. When nothing flew at her from the bedrooms down the hall, she cleared them one by one, gaining confidence as she went.
She ended in the master, the largest province in this kingdom of shag carpet and floral wallpaper. Someone had assaulted the twin dressers standing on the wall opposite the bed, and their drawers hung partially open with clothes dangling over the sides like the tripe of a gutted pig. The bedroom spoke of a hasty departure. Hopefully early enough in the day for the owners to find a safe haven elsewhere.
On her way through the living room, she heard a knock on the door. Justin.
“Can we come in? It’s getting a little dark out here.”
“One minute. I haven’t checked the garage.”
A set of keys dangled from a hook beside the door. She jumped back and to the side when she threw it open, but nothing emerged or moved among the deep shadows in the garage. She waited a moment, then stepped into the doorway with the broom handle cocked above her shoulder like a spear.
A single window on the far side illuminated an ancient pickup truck parked beside a lawnmower that looked more expensive than Heather’s first car. Gasoline and old motor oil mixed with grass clippings and the pungent chemical aroma of lawn fertilizer. For all its age, the truck appeared obsessively shiny; this would be the owner’s project truck, something he drove to auto shows on weekends. She considered it for a moment, climbed inside and stuck the key in the ignition.
The engine caught immediately. But the fuel gauge didn’t move—either it didn’t work or the gas tank really was on empty.
She cut off the motor and returned to the living room to open the front door. Justin and Amber nearly knocked her over in their haste to get inside.
“It’s clear,” Heather said. “Other than a few dust mites, there’s nothing here.”
“Was that a car starting?” Justin asked.
“Old truck in the garage. It works, but I can’t tell how much gas is in it and we really can’t risk being out there when it goes dry.”
Justin nodded in understanding but said nothing. He locked the front door but stared at it for a long time, apparently lost in thought.
“What?” Amber asked.
“This isn’t our house,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to keep them out tonight if they want in.”
Amber didn’t respond. Heather didn’t, either, and for a moment the three of them just stood there in the steadily deepening darkness of this strange living room.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said with an authority she didn’t feel. “They’re breaking rules left and right. It was only a matter of time before they invaded our house. Let’s just hope they don’t find us tonight.”
24.
Amber ate cold beans out of a can. They had left the camp stove and cooking fuel in the Durango, but they wouldn’t have lit it even if they’d brought it. Mom was adamant: no light. And no sound. So they ate in silence, speaking only when necessary and even then in the most hushed of tones. When they finished, they took turns using the bathroom and gathered in the living room.
Justin commandeered the recliner and quickly went to sleep. Or pretended to, at least; he sat down and closed his eyes, and Amber couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or laying there worrying about what would happen next. Nervous, Amber herself grabbed one of the couches but didn’t even try to sleep. It would have been useless.
“I let him manipulate me again,” Mom said quietly.
She lay on her side with her knees drawn up to her midsection. She looked small and sounded even smaller, almost like a child. This sent another wave of fear washing over Amber’s insides. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“It was a trick. He played me. Played us, but me most of all. He did something to the truck to make it break down.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Really?” Mom sat up now and spun around to face her, knees beneath her chin. Her cheeks glistened in the moonlight. “Do you know how long the check engine light’s been on in that thing? Weeks. Never a problem before, now all of a sudden BAM, it dies. Where does it die? On the highway at sunset. He messed with it. I know he did. And I played right into it.”
Amber sighed and shook her head. “Mom…”
“He wanted us out of that house because he couldn’t get in there. Now we’re out. We can hide here, but it’s not ours.”
“We’re going to be okay,” Amber said—even though she didn’t believe it.
“We’re not. Not with me, we’re not.” Mom closed her eyes and hung her head. “I’m stupid, Amber. I’m gullible. I’m trusting. I don’t really think. That’s what gets me the most, you know? He always criticized me for that, not thinking. Not considering, not strategizing. He said I was impulsive and that this lack of thought would someday ruin me, if I didn’t have him there to take the reins.”
She laughed ruefully. “I always thought he was just being a pigheaded, sexist asshole. But he was right.”
“He wasn’t,” Amber said. “And neither are you. You’re smart. And I trust you.”
Mom opened her mouth. But before she could speak, Justin sat straight up.
“Did you hear that?”
She and Mom both shook their heads.
“There’s something outside,” he hissed. “I hear branches and leaves.”
Mom reached for the Ruger. Amber rose and listened. She heard nothing, and in the silence her muscles began to relax and her heart found a way to resume beating.
“Maybe it’s just deer,” she offered quietly.
Somewhere on the other end of the house, a window broke.
“They found us,” Justin said.
The sound of breaking glass reached Heather’s ears from somewhere down the hall, together with the rustling of curtains and the sound of feet thumping on the floor. The front door rattled.
Heather grabbed Amber and pressed the truck keys into her hands.
A window broke in the living room. Glass showered the floor.
Justin charged forward with one of the broom handle stakes and buried it in the chest of a skinny, spidery form that tore through the shadows. It screeched in pain and fell writhing to the floor. Heather spotted another one crawling in behind it and shot it once with the Ruger. It fell backwards.
It got back up.
She grabbed Justin by the shoulder and shoved him towards the kitchen. He stumbled, almost falling in his haste.
Amber opened the door to the garage. In a horrifying flash, Heather realized that she may have just sent the girl into any number of those things—there was a window in there. But movement in the front room seized and redirected her panic. She aimed and fired twice. Something fell, then scrambled back to a standing position just as quickly.
Two more materialized out of the hallway and she momentarily dropped them both. Shell casings bounced off the wall to her right and pinged on the vinyl kitchen floor. One of them struck her cheek, burning it. Smaller and weaker than the others, the creatures struggled to get up.
They were children once.
Children or not, the bullets slowed them but could n
ot put them down for long. “GO!” Heather screamed.
“I AM!” Amber screamed back from somewhere in the garage.
Another window shattered, then another. She wouldn’t be able to hold them off, not for long. How many rounds remained in her magazine? She didn’t know. She…
An unholy screech to her left. She glanced sideways and sighted two more on the back porch, peering at her through the sliding glass door. The tallest raised his fist and brought it down on the door. A crack appeared.
Go, go, go, go, GO
She backed into the garage. She stumbled, staggering backwards until that overgrown lawnmower stopped her with a handle that jabbed into her left kidney. White-hot pain exploded in her lower back. Across the threshold, in the kitchen, the sliding door gave way and showered the vinyl with broken glass. Pounding feet behind it told her she had no time for pain, no time for anything. No time. She pivoted and ran at the truck.
Amber sat in the driver’s seat, Justin beside her. Eyes wide, he looked like an owl.
“Drive!” Heather barked. “Now!”
To Amber, the truck cab smelled like the tool shed at their house in Norfolk.
“Go on!” Justin urged. “Start it!”
The starter spun. The engine caught in a matter of seconds, filling the garage with a smoke-belching roar. It stumbled and she pressed on the gas to hold it up.
Mom hopped into the bed behind her and beat her fist once on the back window.
“GO!” she yelled. The pistol barked once, twice. Something in the doorway to the kitchen wiggled and fell. Amber looked up at the garage door blocking their way.
“Drive through it,” Justin urged.
She found the gear selector and moved it until the little orange arrow at the bottom of the dash hovered over D.
Two more gunshots, each a peal of thunder that assaulted her ears and echoed in the confines of her skull.
“GO! NOW!” Mom screamed.
Amber released the brake and stomped on the gas.
The truck leapt forward with a power she hadn’t expected; this was what the boys at school would have called a “sleeper,” a drag racer in a redneck truck’s clothing. Still, the garage had given her virtually no room to accelerate and so when the front end collided with the garage door, the metal caught the truck and held it there for an agonizing, bowed-out moment.
“Come on,” Justin urged.
She dropped it into reverse and backed up abruptly, only stopping when the rear bumper smashed into the work bench and cabinets behind them. Back into drive. She pressed the gas pedal and the truck charged forward. It crashed into the now-ruined and bulging garage door. Tortured metal crumpled, whined.
And gave way.
The truck exploded into the driveway. The passage through the garage door had shattered one of the headlights, but in the one that remained, Amber saw a pair of figures standing in her path. Without a thought, she accelerated right through them. The truck shuddered on its way over their bodies.
She had expected hundreds of the things, a horde like the zombies wandering the mall parking lot in Day of the Dead. But less than a dozen creatures waited outside, all of them turning to follow the truck as it tore past them and headed for the highway. They gave chase.
Mom fired three, four, five times and stopped. Amber slowed only slightly as the truck careened onto the highway and accelerated into the night.
25.
A single headlight illuminating the road, the truck raced north. After a time, Amber eased off the accelerator and settled at a comfortable seventy miles per hour. She glanced down at the dashboard and hunted for the fuel gauge. The needle rested on “E.”
Not much we can do about that now, is there?
Mom knocked on the rear window, and Justin slid it aside to let her in.
“You okay?” Amber asked as her mother lowered herself onto the bench seat between her and Justin.
“I’m alive,” she said. “So I’m better than I thought I’d be a few minutes ago. Anyway, we have a problem. Did you see the road outside the house? Cars. Three of them, parked on the road.”
Justin’s eyebrows rose. “They can…”
“Yeah,” Mom said. “They can drive. So we’re being chased. The only way we’re going to make it is to get off this road. They’re probably all mounted up by now, and in just a few minutes they’re going to catch up with us. Find a dirt road, Amber, a side road, anything. Just get us off this fast.”
Amber slowed and squinted into the darkness, searching for a turnoff.
But before she found one, the motor began sputtering.
Why am I always so goddamned fucked? Heather screamed in her mind.
Because you’re goddamned fucked, her mind answered back.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Justin exclaimed in the seat beside her.
“Pull over,” Heather ordered. “Now, now, right here!”
Amber jerked the truck to a stop on the shoulder just as the motor sputtered for the final time and died. She sat there with the steering wheel in a death grip, staring straight ahead. Invaded, Heather saw, by the dark armies of panic.
Heather reached across her and cut off the lights. “Come on,” she said. “We’re bailing out.”
“But…” Amber began.
“But nothing! They got in that house, they’ll get in this truck. We need to get away from it NOW!”
She threw the passenger door open, shoving Justin out into the night. She grabbed Amber and dragged her out after her, every alarm in her head screeching at the dome light that blazed to life when she opened the door. It burned like a little sun, announcing to anything watching them that there were people here.
She slammed the door shut, cutting the light, and surveyed their surroundings. Above them, the moon illuminated a gray landscape of fields dotted with outbuildings. Several hundred yards away, dark blobs that could have been barns and a farmhouse stood in silent menace. She looked from these to the woods in the distance.
Choose well, she told herself.
Her grip tightened on the Ruger. She dropped the magazine and turned it sideways in the moonlight.
It was empty. The slide hadn’t locked back, though; she still had one in the chamber. Just one.
“Where are we going?” Justin asked.
Heather inhaled deeply and forced her mind to stop spinning. It wasn’t time for that last bullet, not yet. If they could make those woods, they could still pull this off. Maybe.
“There,” she said. “Run!”
Justin’s heart hammered in his chest. His legs and his lungs and every other functioning part of his body burned with the effort of driving his sneakered feet into the ground and hurling himself towards the woods. He heard the
vampires
cars or trucks or vans or whatever the hell those things were riding in motoring down the highway in the rapidly collapsing distance. For one crazy instant, exuberance exploded in his gut and he thought surely they would miss the disabled truck on the side of the road and keep going, going, going. But the buzz of engines and tires slowed and this moment rapidly fell behind him.
The woods, he thought, we’ve got to make the woods. They’ll only follow us so deep into the woods, because they can’t risk getting lost in a place where there’s nowhere to hide once the sun comes up. They’ll go a little ways in, but not much. They won’t look long. And we’ve got a head start on them. We can do this.
The perceived safety of the tree line seemed to remain at a constant distance no matter how hard he pushed. And then it suddenly jumped up right in front of him, assaulting his face with branches and twigs and thorns that grabbed and tore at his clothes. The car sounds had died altogether now, and as he crashed into the woods on the heels of Heather and Amber he heard something else, another sound so familiar to him from his life before but now imbued with life-ending implications: car doors slamming shut.
Scrambling over a fallen tree, he realized he lost sight of Heather and Amber. He locate
d them again when Heather grabbed him by the seat of his pants and hauled him to an abrupt stop.
“Down,” she whispered urgently. “Here, with us!”
“We need to keep going!” he panted. His skin tingled and his lungs blazed. “We need to go deeper!”
“They’re here. They’ll hear us.”
Unable to mount a coherent resistance, he allowed her to pull him down beside her, behind the tree. Heather pushed Amber down into a lying position, doing the same with Justin himself. She rose only long enough to grab a pair of dead branches still festooned with brown leaves.
“Be quiet,” she whispered. “It’s a long tree line. There are a lot of woods, and we could have entered them at any point. It’ll be a long night, but they don’t have forever. We can live in the sun; they can’t.”
His throat seemed to be closing its hands around his vocal cords and restricting speech. Whether it owed this effect to physical exhaustion or some evolutionary mechanism designed to make him shut up in the presence of sabertooth tigers, he didn’t know. Sticks and twigs dug into his side. The earthy aroma of the forest rose up from the bed of leaves on which he lay.
Door slamming again, engines starting. They’re going away, he thought with giddy optimism. They’re moving on, giving up, going home! They don’t know where we are so they’re just quitting! We’ve made it!
But then he heard the bumps and the creaks. The ups and downs of vehicles moving across a rough surface, and he realized that the vampires were driving towards the woods.
26.
Nothing works out, Heather thought with spiraling despair. She wondered if she should use the Ruger now, while she still had time. She transferred it from the hand at the end of her pinned right arm to her left. She thumbed off the safety. Her insides writhed like living things with their own independent existence. Rebelling, she felt, against the wicked thoughts taking command of her head.
The engines slowed as they approached the forest, then settled to an idle as the vehicles stopped. Mild relief surged when she realized they weren’t going to drive straight into the forest. But it disappeared quickly.
The Last Days of October Page 15