Until... | Book 1 | Until The Sun Goes Down

by Hamill, Ike

  Contents

  Title Page

  Part One - Altruism Flat Tire

  House

  Entry

  Part Two - Denial Vampires

  Home

  Cellar

  Home

  Part Three - Sacrifice Visitors

  Assessment

  Ditch

  Coming

  Part Four - Redemption Explosion

  Dark

  Light

  Shadows

  Sun

  Sterile

  Part Five - Rebirth Growth

  Betrayal

  Submission

  About

  More - Stay Away

  More - Fiero's Pizza

  More - Migrators

  UNTIL THE SUN GOES DOWN

  BY

  IKE HAMILL

  WWW.IKEHAMILL.COM

  Dedication:

  For Mr. King. When I was a kid, your books scared the bejesus out of me. I’ve been trying to recapture that feeling ever since.

  Special Thanks:

  Thanks to Christine, for suggesting this story.

  Thanks to Lynne, as always, for her edits.

  Copyright © 2019 Ike Hamill

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events have been fabricated only to entertain. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the consent of Ike Hamill.

  PART ONE:

  Altruism

  Flat Tire

  (Here's what happened the other day.)

  Here’s what happened the other day:

  The steering wheel jerked to the right when the tire blew. It felt like a tremendous animal, lurking in the tall grass that grew right alongside the road, had struck out and snagged the tire in its gnashing teeth.

  The brakes locked up and a cloud of dust enveloped my rusty truck. The back end of the truck shifted to the left so I was effectively blocking the road. Granted, I had only been in the area a handful of days, but I hadn’t seen another soul on that stretch of dirt road. I straightened the truck out anyway so I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way.

  The rubber was grinding on the wheel—I could feel it.

  I was sweating like a pig before I even opened the door. The only thing keeping me cool had been the moving air. Now that the truck was stopped, everything was perfectly still. If I had stood in one place for too long, I probably would have used up all the oxygen and suffocated.

  The hood of the truck was about ten-thousand degrees. I made the mistake of touching it as I went around to see the shredded tire. I can’t imagine how the thing just disintegrated like that. Strands of treacherous metal poked out from the rubber.

  I glanced at my unblemished, soft palms, saying goodbye to smooth skin. There was no way I was going to change that tire without cutting and scraping the hell out of my fingers. Sweat rolled down my forehead and the middle of my back.

  I’m a pretty self-reliant guy. Maybe that’s the wrong word. It’s not like I have a bunch of confidence in my own ability, I just hate interacting with strangers. There’s that feeling when you have to extend yourself. You have to ask for help and admit that you are out of your element. I try to avoid that feeling at all costs. But in this case, with the sun practically burning the skin off the back of my neck and a shredded tire, I reached for my phone.

  No signal.

  I mean, of course there was no signal. I was maybe three or four miles away from the house, and there was no signal there. Even in the center of town there was only one bar on the display and I had crossed over a big hill before I turned off the Prescott Road.

  I put my phone back in my pocket and dabbed my forehead with my shirt.

  “Wait!”

  There was something I had read before I moved to the middle of nowhere. It was about emergencies and cellphones. They said that if you dial 9-1-1, your phone will connect to whatever it can find, even if the tower is not on your network. They said that even if you don’t have a SIM card, the phone will find a way.

  Was this an emergency?

  I sighed. No, this was not an emergency. People got in real trouble for bothering dispatch. Maybe if I was ninety years old, or had a small child or something. But I was, ostensibly, a perfectly healthy thirty-five-year-old dude, not obese or crippled. I put the phone away a second time.

  There were three obvious choices—walk, change the tire, or try to drive on the rim. The third was the dumbest. I almost did it anyway just because it required the least amount of effort. That’s how hot it was.

  Rather, that’s how hot it felt. I mean, there are plenty of hotter places in the world. One time I visited Arizona in the summer and it was like your lungs were cooking every time you took a breath. There were misters over sidewalks. Without them I’m sure that people would have collapsed and fried like an egg on the concrete. Still, people survived there and probably didn’t drive on their rims when they got a flat.

  The chrome door handle was almost too hot to touch. The hinges creaked and I felt around behind the seat, looking for the jack. I found the tire iron. The paint was chipped and rusted, just like the rest of the truck. I don’t remember what year the vehicle was—seventy-two? When I registered it, the clerk laughed at the mileage.

  “Get out much?” she asked.

  The mileage I copied down from the odometer was exactly fifty-one more than the previous time the truck had been registered, and that was four years before.

  “Oh. I don’t know. I inherited it from my uncle,” I said.

  I’m not sure where Uncle Walt got the truck from. Like his weird old farmhouse—he had left me that too—it had just always been there at the end of the dirt road that didn’t have a name, just a number.

  Anyway, that’s all I found behind the seat. No jack, just a rusty tire iron. The spare, I knew about. That was sitting in the bed of the truck. When I went to get the truck inspected, they had refused to put a sticker on it until I agreed to buy a spare tire from them. Afraid to be swindled, I had insisted on looking myself. The guy showed me where it would have been mounted if it existed.

  “It was an optional accessory,” he said, “but it would have been mounted up under here, between the axle and the bumper. Maybe your uncle ditched it when he put on this hitch.”

  I crouched down looking at the rusty bolts.

  “Then how was it inspected four years ago?”

  He shrugged. “You can go home and look for the spare if you want, but I have to fail the inspection. It’s going to be another twelve bucks when you come back.”

  That’s how they get you. If they find anything wrong, they have to fail the vehicle in order for you to drive away. Then, it’s another fee when you bring back the truck to try to get it inspected again. Anyway, that’s why I had a new spare tire in the bed of the truck. At the time, I had never expected to use it. Why would I? I can’t remember the last time I had a flat.

  It had never occurred to me to look for a jack. That had to be part of the inspection though, right? If they demanded a spare, why wouldn’t they require a jack to be in the vehicle as well.

  I sighed and then flinched back when I tried to lean against the hot metal.

  Option two was out. I could walk or try to drive on the rim.

  “Walk,” I whispered.

  (Like I said, it was hot.)

  Like I said, it was hot.

  Arguably, it wasn’t that hot.

  I grew up in South Carolina, in a fetid swamp vaguely near the coast. Now that was hot. It was different though. It was usual. You knew to take it easy certain times of day. You knew not to try to walk four miles of dirt road at one in the afternoon. You knew to stay in the shade a
nd have some water around.

  All of that wisdom flew out of my head at some point. By the time I moved to Maine to live in the house that I inherited from Uncle Walt, I was the kind of person dumb enough to be driving around in a fifty-year-old truck right into the teeth of a scorching hot day.

  I had walked about fifty paces when I heard the crunch of gravel. Instead of turning around, I almost broke into a sprint. I was convinced that I would see the old truck rolling towards me, a limping predator out for my blood. Maine is that kind of place. It’s the kind of place where trucks become possessed and hunt down newcomers on dirt roads in the middle of nowhere.

  “Hey,” someone yelled.

  I turned and saw a bright, shiny new car sitting next to Uncle Walt’s truck. The guy was waving at me.

  My social anxiety had evaporated in the heat. I practically skipped towards the guy.

  “Car trouble?”

  “Flat. I don’t have a jack,” I said. I followed his eyes down and I realized that I was still holding the tire iron.

  “I bet I can help with that,” he said.

  His car started to back up. The paranoid part of me spoke up and I knew that he was going to keep reversing until he got back to the Prescott Road, leaving me there. It would be within his rights. I probably looked like a crazy person, standing there with a tire iron and sweating through my shirt.

  He didn’t. The car swung in neatly behind the truck, his hazards popped on, and he got out.

  “Wow, it’s hot,” he said.

  His trunk popped open and he straightened back up. I tossed the tire iron towards the flat tire—no need to brandish it—and tried to lean against the fender again. It was still burning hot, of course. I rubbed my seared flesh.

  He was rummaging in the trunk when he asked me something that I didn’t quite hear.

  “Pardon?” I asked, approaching slowly.

  “It occurs to me that this little jack probably isn’t going to do much to lift that truck. Here, hold this.”

  He handed me one of those little donut tires.

  “I have a spare.”

  “It’s not for your truck. I’m just hoping to add some height to this.”

  He held out one of those scissor jacks. For his small car, I’m sure it would be fine. With about fifteen inches of travel, the jack would easily get his car off the ground. For Uncle Walt’s truck, fifteen inches wouldn’t even unload the springs.

  He had a handful of parts and the jack. I followed him towards the truck.

  “Lay that on the ground.”

  He maneuvered the donut tire under the frame and then tried to balance his jack on top. After assembling the rest of the pieces into a crank, he began to extend the jack.

  “Thanks for stopping. Maybe I could try your phone or something? I really don’t think that this is going to…”

  “No signal out here. That’s why I stopped. If I had my car we would be all set. I have a really good…”

  The tire tipped and the jack spilled to the ground.

  “This is a rental,” he said, gesturing to the shiny car. “Mine’s in the shop. You’re right, this isn’t going to work. Can I give you a lift to town?”

  “Actually, my house is just another few miles. If I could get there, I can call a tow truck or triple A or something.”

  I had said the wrong thing. His eyes stayed on mine while he reassessed me. Clearly, I was untrustworthy. If the roles were reversed, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even have stopped.

  “I’m supposed to be picking up my kid,” he said. “I really don’t want to be late.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m headed to town anyway, so I don’t mind dropping you off.”

  “Sure,” I said. Politeness dictated that I ignore the obvious lie. If he was really in that much of a hurry, would he have stopped at all? Was driving another ten minutes really going to upset his plans? If the jack had worked, we would have taken at least that long to change the tire. No, when I suggested that he take me back to my lair, he had reassessed and decided that he wasn’t going to let me lure him to a more remote location.

  “Oh!” I said. “What if we use my spare to prop up the jack? It’s taller and more sturdy.”

  He gathered up everything and stood.

  “Then what would we put on the truck?”

  “Oh.”

  It had to be the heat—I wasn’t thinking clearly.

  I followed him around the truck, towards his open trunk.

  “So, yeah, I guess if you could drop me off in town, that would be great,” I said. I was jabbering to fill the awkward silence of mistrust. “I can’t imagine why there’s no jack. I mean, don’t they check that kind of thing when they inspect a vehicle? The thing, you know, just sat in my uncle’s barn for…”

  “It’s not under the hood?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The jack?”

  “Under the…”

  “Yeah.”

  He tossed the stuff in his trunk, slammed the lid, and then veered around me. I went to the door of the truck, but he kept going. From the front, he popped the hood. It screeched and complained when he raised it.

  “Here,” he said.

  I blinked at the dark cavity until I saw what he meant. The jack was mounted on top of the inside of the wheel well.

  “Oh. I guess I never thought to look.”

  He reached in for it and I stopped him.

  “I’ll get it. It looks dirty as hell.”

  From that point forward, his job was mostly consulting and holding things. I was glad that he stuck around. If the jack hadn’t worked or if one of the lug nuts had been impossible to turn, I would have still needed his help. Hell, without him, I wouldn’t have known where to put the jack. It attached under the front bumper instead of back under the frame. I’m not usually dumb about such things, but the truck was older than I was.

  Fortunately, the kind stranger—I still didn’t know his name—seemed to know what to do.

  “You’re going to want to break the nuts first,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  I went to loosen them.

  “Where you from?” I asked. I was thinking about the fact that he had a rental car. The heat had made me forget that he was only renting it because his own car was in the shop. He didn’t have an accent that I could discern, but that wasn’t surprising. A lot of the locals didn’t have an accent.

  “From here,” he said. “The Depot.”

  I nodded and wiped sweat away with my shirt. The lug nuts were loosened so I went back to the front to start jacking.

  “You’ll want to put your parking brake on, if you haven’t,” he said. “These things will roll right away from the jack.”

  “Of course.”

  I went to do it.

  “How about you?” he asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Oh. Originally, Mississippi, then South Carolina really. Virginia, Jersey, all over. I live here now. At the end of this road.”

  “Just you?”

  Now, I was the one who was a little creeped out. There seemed to be some implication behind the question. If I was all alone, would I be able to defend myself in the middle of the night if someone should come creeping around? What if he was a serial killer, out searching for his next victim? One of those killers, BTK or maybe the Night Stalker, would find people with flat tires. Maybe I’m making that up.

  “Just me,” I said. I had intended to lie. The truth popped out anyway. “If you have to go pick up your kid, I think I have this.”

  “I have a minute. I’ll just stick around until you get the new one in place.”

  “Thanks.”

  I wiped my forehead again. With the panic of being stranded wearing off, my social anxiety was coming back. I almost wanted to tell him to get lost, but that would have required a confrontation of sorts. I kept my mouth shut and kept working.

  By the way, I was right about my hands.
The metal sticking out from the steel-belted tires scraped up my palms when I tried to throw the ruined tire in the bed.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  I mean, of course I was. Blood dripped from my fingers. I got it all over the rubber of the brand new spare. The truck might not have been haunted when I started, but all that blood probably summoned a half-dozen demons into it by the time I was finished.

  He handed me the lug nuts one at a time and I secured them before lowering the jack. Of course, he had to show me how to reverse the direction of the jack first.

  “Thanks again,” I said when the jack disengaged and clanked to the dirt.

  I extended a hand to shake.

  He cringed and put up his hands like it was a robbery.

  “Oh,” I said, looking down at the sticky blood on my palms. “Of course.”

  “Don’t forget to tighten those nuts. You might want to check the torque when you get home.”

  “Uh huh. Thanks.”

  I waved and waited for him to walk away.

  As soon as he turned around and drove off, my affection for him began to come back. He had saved me quite a bit of trouble, after all. The blown tire had metaphorically robbed me and left me sweaty and beaten. A priest and a Levite had passed me by and then this Samaritan stopped for me even though he had nothing to gain.

  “I have to get out of the sun,” I whispered to myself. “I’m going crazy out here.”

  House

  (Nobody could possibly live here.)

  Nobody could possibly live here.

  I’m standing here looking at this dusty, peeling, relic of a house. All the windows are closed and the grass in the lawn is as high as the porch railing. But I can’t stop thinking of the Good Samaritan—the guy who stopped to help me change my tire even though he was going to be late picking up his kid.