1.
He did it.
Heather Palmer unzipped the tent. Cocooned in her sleeping bag, Amber stirred but did not wake, settling easily back into the kind of sleep enjoyed only by exhausted teenagers. Heather froze until the girl resumed the rhythmic breathing of slumber. Only when she felt confident that her popping joints wouldn’t wake her daughter did she continue into the night.
Although daytime temperatures had lingered in the sixties all week, by night the forest grew chilly. Hands shoved in the pockets of her coat, Heather shuffled over and lowered herself into one of the two chairs stationed beside the remains of the night’s fire. They had cleared the space earlier but already a blanket of dead foliage covered the campsite. Leaves sprinkled down around her with each sigh of the weakening autumn as it wound through stands of black oak and white ash, red maple and yellowwood.
He said he’d do it and this time he did.
No, she told herself. He didn’t.
Despite the coat’s protection, she shivered. She should have taken his pistol, she realized, and then she wouldn’t even have to think these things. She should have thrown it in the truck with the rest of the camping gear. Mike was a lot safer with that thing out of the house. He still could have slashed his wrists or hung himself, but that would have hurt and after all his bluster, Mike was a big baby. He required 24-hour skilled nursing care when he came down with the flu. Guys like that couldn’t hang themselves.
But they could blow their heads off. This worried Heather a great deal, because things were different now. Not just the move from Norfolk to Deep Creek—she’d moved with him, and moved farther, before this. And not just Amber turning eighteen, either. Now…
Now I don’t need him anymore.
Right. The one good thing about turning forty—the solitary shimmer of light and hope and optimism there among the collapse of her chest and ass, the expansion of her midsection and the early-stage leatherization of her skin—was that her grandmother’s trust paid out. And while it hadn’t made her a millionaire, it did provide sustainable freedom. It meant she could buy a house, go to school and keep it all going for a few years while she figured out what to do with the rest of her life. A life which, if she so chose, didn’t have to include Mike.
The balance of power had shifted. And he knew that. So all bets were off.
A branch snapped in the distance and splashed into the leaves covering the forest floor. Heather jerked with a jolt of adrenaline. Her head snapped up and she scanned the woods for any sign of movement. She would have liked to have Mike’s pistol for another reason; she and Amber were all alone, miles from the nearest police station, farther still from the nearest hospital. While she had enjoyed this one-on-one time with Amber, she had remained conscious of their position the entire time: two women alone in the woods, unarmed.
Tomorrow, she thought.
Things would be better when they got back home. And not just the toilets and showers and electricity; Mike would have cooled off, calmed down. They could talk about things, maybe with the assistance of a counselor this time. And while the balance of power tilted now a little more in her favor, that didn’t necessarily mean the end. Even if she had told him to get the hell out. Honestly, they probably needed this—a big fight where everybody spoke their minds—in order to move forward. Together.
And maybe she’d find his body sprawled on the floor in their bedroom.
The wind blew then, disturbing the ground covering of dead leaves and rattling the survivors still clinging to half-naked branches. It spoke of the winter to come, a cold and cruel season of death and reduction that culled the weak from every species. North Carolina winters could be short and mild, but they killed anyway. Cold air from Canada swooped in like an invading army with days that besieged the psyche until it understood that summer, spring and autumn were dreams. Until it confessed that this—mornings of frozen breath and stinging skin, trees raising their barren branches in silent surrender to the gray skies that pelted them with freezing rain, overwhelming sadness at the eventual death of the preceding year and the stillbirth of the next—was reality.
Because leaves always fell. Eventually, everything died.
“Are you still there?” she whispered. “Or did you do it? Did you show me this time?”
The dead foliage gave no answer. Feeling more alone than ever, she allowed herself to cry quietly, but only for a short while. When she felt her legs capable of supporting her weight, she rose from the chair and retreated into the tent.
Tomorrow, she told herself. Everything will feel better tomorrow. Everything’s going to be okay.
2.
This is how he makes you put up with this shit again and again. He preys on your concern.
In the single southbound lane of Highway 49, Heather gripped the steering wheel and willed her lips still. She did that sometimes—moving her lips when she talked to herself, whispering the lines of whatever internal monologue had seized her brain at that particular moment. Unlike smoking, which she’d given up the moment she discovered she was pregnant with Amber, she couldn’t kick this particular habit. No matter how hard she tried.
“What are you talking to yourself about?”
Amber’s voice startled her so much that she nearly launched herself into the sagging headliner of her old Dodge Durango. Immediately, her face reddened.
“Nothing.”
Laughing with Amber as they packed the Durango that morning, she had remembered how she’d been thinking the night before and felt silly. Of course he’s not dead, she chided herself. You halfwit. A person’s fears added up much higher in the depths of the night, especially a cold night in the woods. Reality had a tendency to bend in the dark; a person’s understanding of the possible and impossible fluctuated with the condition of her environment. And just a few days before Halloween, at that. Fertile ground for the growth of an overactive imagination.
Lions and tigers and bears and husbands committing suicide, oh my!
Right. There was no Wizard of Oz, and Heather was too chubby and old to be Dorothy. Mike would be there when she got home. Lying on the couch, probably watching ESPN or sleeping. He would have repaired the hole in the wall, but he would have left a pile of dirty dishes in the sink because everything would be normal again and things couldn’t be normal again if Mike didn’t leave her some dishes. Maybe Clyde, the old loser he’d met down at the American Legion, would be passed out on the floor. She could kick him in the ribs. He could ogle her backside on the way out.
Normal.
“You have a signal?” she asked.
Amber looked down at her mobile phone and unlocked the screen. “Nope.”
“Try mine.”
She did. “Yours is dead, too.”
“Nice,” she muttered.
She willed the Mike-thoughts away by concentrating on her surroundings. Highway 49’s two lanes wound like a fat black snake past the churned-up remains of the corn and tobacco harvest, the wire-enclosed cow and horse pastures. The occasional white frame house supervised collections of corrugated tin outbuildings standing beneath a cloudless sky. Ancient curing sheds and barns listed to the left and right in various states of disrepair. In those spots where three centuries of settlement had yet to claim nature for itself, leaves on great trees blazed with the vivid colors of autumn, golds and yellows, bronzes and browns, coppers and reds so rich it struck her as impossible that they could ever fall.
“I don’t want you to use the money for me,” Amber said.
Heather blinked. “What?”
“Grandma’s money. I don’t want it. I can take loans for school, and I have my whole life to work. You guys are old. Use it for yourselves. That’s what you were fight
ing about, right? The money?”
Heather looked over at her. The girl sat with her hands folded around her smartphone, her head resting against the passenger window. She looked back at Heather with a pair of deep brown eyes set in a face that Heather’s own genes could not explain. Very little of Heather had translated into Amber’s appearance; whereas Heather’s face was broad and plain, Amber enjoyed the delicate bone structure of a model or a particularly beautiful movie star. Amber was slender where Heather was thick, curvy where she was straight. Only her coloration—brown eyes, brown hair, pale skin—and a slight roundness of the face suggested a familial relation.
“We fight about a lot of things,” Heather said. “But using the money for you isn’t one of them.”
“Bull. I heard you guys.”
“What?”
“The whole neighborhood heard you.” Amber rolled her eyes and collapsed even further into her seat. “Okay, so he wants a new truck. Get him the truck, it’s no big deal. I can take loans. Seriously, Mom, I don’t care. Just get him a truck, tell him to shut up and you guys can use the rest to go on vacation or something.”
“Do you have any idea how much a four-year college actually costs?”
“A lot. But I don’t care. It’s me, it’s my life, I’ll take care of it. You want to buy me something? Pull into this gas station right here and get me a Diet Coke.”
Up ahead, a red and yellow Shell sign announced the presence of the gas station and convenience store where they’d stopped to buy the raw material for s’mores on their way out. Heather lifted her foot from the accelerator and transferred it to the brake pedal. The Durango rolled to a stop at the nearest set of pumps. Heather withdrew a five dollar bill from her purse and handed it to Amber. “Get me one, too,” she said. “And some gum.”
“Got it. Can we listen to something other than old people music the rest of the way?”
“Sure.”
Amber smiled at her as she turned and started towards the store. Heather sighed before reaching forward and turning off the Police CD that had played ever since they left this morning. Her old people music. Shaking her head, she pressed the first stereo preset button to tune in the Top 40 station Amber liked so much. Hearing only dead air, she switched to the next station in the lineup, then the next, then the next.
All dead.
“Mom?”
She looked up. Amber approached the truck, arms folded tightly across her chest. The pinched mask of worry that had replaced her face chased away Heather’s concerns over another of her truck’s manifold electrical problems.
“Something’s wrong in there,” Amber said. “I think you need to see it.”
Despite the gathering of cars outside, the store was deserted. A candy display lay overturned on the dirty floor, chocolate bars and fruit chews and bubble gum splattered about the point of impact like the guts of a giant piñata. A magazine rack stood partially ripped away from the register counter. Several feet away, a junta of mummified hot dogs witnessed everything from a motionless rotisserie.
She pushed several issues of Sports Illustrated and Maxim out of her way with her leading foot as she stepped inside. “Hey!” she called. “Anybody here?”
“There’s nobody,” Amber said behind her.
Heather listened, hoping for a voice from the stockroom, but she heard only her own pulse. Warning lights blazed in her head, but these failed to disturb the silence. No background music, no shuffling feet, no humming drink coolers. Just her pulse, quickening now, and her breath rising to match it.
She tiptoed around the cash register—it seemed appropriate somehow to stay quiet—and checked the aisles. Nothing. On the other side of the store, the drink coolers held mute crowds of sodas, beer and cheap wines. Her eyes slid across to the milk shelf, where four columns of plastic jugs stretched into the darkness behind them. Sickly white curds floated atop a yellowish liquid inside each one. The power had evidently gone out long ago.
Why is it out? And why haven’t they cut it back on?
She felt like she had stumbled onto a movie set. She could almost hear the director with his bullhorn. Okay, you’re going to poke around in the store for a while, then run outside and scream your head off while the camera zooms out and the audience suddenly learns this whole episode took place inside a snow globe.
She could handle the screaming part just fine. Oh, yeah. She’d win a freaking Oscar.
On the counter by the cash register, amidst scattered tins of chewing tobacco and little bottles of Ginseng X-treme Energy Booster (For Drivers On The GO!), lay the receiver of a land-line telephone. She stepped behind the register, picked it up, and pushed several buttons on the dialer mounted beneath the counter. She had so expected it to be dead that she barely blinked when it gave no dial tone.
Amber watched, lips pursed.
Heather set down the phone and looked around her feet. Whatever commotion had occurred in front of the counter had also occurred behind it. A plastic basket of pens, rubber bands and matchbooks had overturned and lay scattered about the floor of the raised cashier’s platform next to a display of Halloween candy, also overturned. Rolls of pricing stickers and receipt paper had fallen off the shelves beneath the counter and joined the other sundries in the mess. She pivoted to survey the rest of the store from this higher vantage point and her foot struck something hard and heavy that scraped on the dirty industrial tile.
A sawed-off shotgun.
It was a double barrel, broken open in the middle of what Heather’s gut told her was an attempt to reload. Long-buried training she had received as a Navy military policewoman twenty years ago helped her resist the urge to pick it up and examine it more closely. She knelt beside the shotgun and bent until she could see the brass heads of the shell casings.
Firing pin strikes on the primers. Someone had used it.
“What happened?” Amber asked.
“Nothing good.”
She laid the gun on the counter without closing it. Right in front of her, a display of Frito-Lay products stood undisturbed by the two loads of buckshot that the clerk had apparently emptied into somebody who had subsequently made it out of here without leaving his innards all over the floor.
Heather raised her eyes and looked at the scene beyond the plate glass window covering the storefront. In front of her Durango, a late model Chevrolet Suburban sat waiting for its owner. A Ford pickup truck with one flat tire and a faded For Sale sign in the windshield rested in one of the parking spaces slotted along the front of the convenience store, with two other vehicles that probably belonged to other customers parked in the others. There should have been a half-dozen people in here, counting the clerk.
“This is weird,” Amber said.
“Yeah,” Heather replied. Her voice came out a register higher than normal thanks to the muscles in her chest, which had begun to tighten like the ones in her shoulders. “Where do you think the owners of those cars went?”
“Color me clueless. Maybe it’s the rapture. We should have gone to church more.”
Heather took a deep breath and scanned the store. Her eyes lit upon a pair of doors set into the wall beside the drink coolers. A sign centered over the top of the frames proclaimed these as RESTROOMS.
“I’m going to check the bathrooms.”
She stepped down from the register platform and approached the doors. She stood before the one marked WOMEN for a moment, then retreated back into an aisle and returned with a roll of paper towels. She tore open the plastic, ripped off several sheets and wrapped them around the doorknob. But before she could twist it, her hand stopped on its own.
Something on the other side of the door moved.
She pulled back, blinking and staring at the door. The sun streaming through the plate glass warmed her neck almost to the burning point. She stopped breathing as her ears pricked for a repetition of that sound.
Her head suddenly swam with the vision of a pile of dead men and women staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
Their lips spoke no words, but their mottled faces betrayed the disease that had driven them into the bathroom. They had fallen to a bug that had existed on its own in some dark corner of Africa or the Amazon for hundreds of years before a human picked it up and brought it home. They had died with blood streaming from their noses and ears and eyes as their throats swelled shut and choked them to death from the inside. They would stink, but no flies would buzz about their bodies; the very air would be pure poison.
“What is it?” Amber asked.
“I don’t know,” Heather said. To the door, she called out, “Hello? Is anyone in there? Are you injured?”
Nothing.
Her nerves, coiled like tightly wound springs, felt ready to pop.
“On second thought,” she said, stepping away from the door, “let’s leave these be.”
Heather swept the store again with her eyes. The sun blazing through the glass made it warm in here even though the air outside bore a seasonable October chill. Beyond the abandoned Suburban lay the road. Past that, a long row of double-stacked mailboxes perched beside the start of a dirty road announced the presence of a trailer park behind the trees. A big trailer park, judging from the number of mailboxes. Beside the gas station, a livestock fence marked the border with a vast open field of grass and dozens of wandering cattle.
But no people.
She thought now of the silence in the morning sky as they had packed the truck, the stillness there as they hiked the woods one last time before leaving. The old man who owned the land hadn’t come to the door when she’d knocked to thank him for letting them camp there, but she had assumed then that he just hadn’t been home.
“Can you remember seeing any other cars on the road this morning?” she asked Amber. “When was the last time we saw another car or person?”
Amber looked away as she thought it over, then swallowed. “Right before we set up camp. When you stopped to tell that old dude we were there.”
Oh my God.
A nucleus of dread pulsed now in Heather’s center, emitting nothing but rivers of cold blood. It sucked the light from the atmosphere around her and dimmed the sun. Something had happened here, something bad, but it had happened elsewhere, too, and probably everywhere. Because this store, she felt, had been deserted for days. And no one from the trailer park next door had come over to loot it.
The Last Days of October Page 1
