Heather thumbed off the safety with one hand while she pushed Amber backwards with another.
“Go back upstairs and hide,” she hissed.
“No! I’m staying with you!”
Frustration throbbed. She wanted to yell at Amber to quit being so stubborn, but she didn’t dare.
“Go upstairs,” she repeated in a low but firm voice, “and hide.”
Before Amber could respond to that, the presence on the other side of the door knocked. Her eyes widened as she backed up one step. Heather swallowed and turned.
Knock knock knock.
She aimed the pistol at the door again.
“Who’s there?”
The knocker paused. Heather was about to announce that she had a gun, that she would shoot without hesitation, when he spoke.
“Heather? It’s me. Open up.”
Mike.
6.
In a flash of understanding, she realized that there really was a God and while He periodically did very bad things, He actually did love Heather Palmer. He’d sent her husband back. Wiped out everybody else, left nothing behind but leaves and crosses. And Mike.
Her grip on the pistol loosened as she lowered it, turning to Amber. “It’s your dad!”
Amber’s eyes widened. She glanced in horror at the door, shook her head, her face white. Ridiculous, because her father had come home and didn’t she want to see him? Didn’t she want them all to reunite?
“No,” she said. “Mom, it’s not…”
“Heather? Let me in.”
She pressed the pistol into Amber’s hands. “Hold this!” She felt her lips spreading into a ridiculously wide grin. She spun and charged towards the door.
“I’m right here!” she cried out. “Hang on!”
“MOM! STOP!”
Her hands shook as she flipped the deadbolt. Her fingers slipped and trembled in their efforts to disengage the knob lock, but they did it and closed around the knob itself. She turned it. She pulled the door open.
“NO!”
He stood on the porch, just beyond the threshold.
Amber screamed.
Raising her arms to welcome him inside, Heather heard the flies before the sight registered in her brain. They covered him by the thousands, on his face, his hands, in his hair, fat little raisins with beating, buzzing wings. They swirled around the twin black pools of his eyes—not brown eyes, black eyes, two lumps of charcoal set in a flyblown face. He opened his mouth with a funeral of a smile.
Oh God oh God WHAT IS THAT
The wind shifted outside and blew in with it the stench of death and disease and a hundred putrid things. The Mike-thing opened its mouth and invaded her house with the gravewind of its breath. Just enough moonlight flowed in around it to display its
fangs, those are fangs
teeth. And yet still she stood with her arms open to the creature on the front porch.
“Can I come in?” It asked.
“Mike?” she whispered. “What…”
She didn’t get to finish. Amber shoulder-checked her aside, aimed the pistol at the monster’s chest and squeezed the trigger three times. It screeched and stumbled backwards across the porch, falling just short of the stairs. As Amber shoved her backwards and lurched forward to slam the door, Heather saw it getting up.
And the others. There had to be two dozen or more out there, wandering up and down her street.
The door slammed shut just as the thing regained its footing and leapt forward.
She just shot you in the chest three times HOW CAN YOU GET UP
Amber reached forward and shot the deadbolt closed. The monster outside screeched again. Claws scratched at the wood.
“Amber? Amber, is that you? Let me in.”
Heather scooted away from the door on her buttocks until she struck the bottom of the stairs. Her lungs struggled to keep pace with her galloping heart. The foyer stank of sulphur and cordite. Her right cheek stung where a hot shell casing had bounced off the wall and struck her face. None of this compared to the spinning in her brain.
Amber stood at the door, still clutching the pistol with both hands. Ears ringing, Heather blinked at this strange figure caught in the moonlight trickling in through the living room windows.
She just saved your ass, Heather realized.
“GO AWAY!” Amber screamed.
“Heather? Open the door.”
This wasn’t Mike at all. Not her husband, not the father of her child. This voice on the other side of the door was sandpaper and dry leaves, desiccated cockroach husks and castaway snakeskin. It was
fangs, I saw fangs in its mouth
a mockery of her soulmate. It assaulted her ears and through her ears it assaulted her brain, which could not process this.
“YOU’RE NOT MY DAD!” Amber screamed. She swayed precariously. Tears ran in her voice, which broke like Heather’s intellect. “SO GET THE FUCK OFF OF MY PORCH!”
“Let me in, Amber. I’ve missed you.”
“FUCK OFF!”
Heather struggled to her knees, then her feet. She approached Amber from behind, gently placing her hands over the trembling Ruger. Amber released it, turned and buried her face in Heather’s shoulder, sobbing. Heather flipped the safety and stuck the weapon in the back of her jeans. The still-warm barrel pressed through her underwear and heated her skin.
“Why does he look like that? Why does he sound like that?”
Heather looked over the top of Amber’s head at the front door. Dark wood stared back at her. On the other side of it stood something that could take three bullets to the chest and shake them off.
And what kind of creature does that?
“Who are you and what have you done with Mike?” she demanded.
“I am Mike.”
Amber shook harder. Heather pulled her in even closer and held her like a baby. “No,” she said, “you’re not. You’re a monster.”
“Don’t you love me? It’s cold out here. It’s getting colder. Are you going to let me freeze to death?”
It drew out her insides with its voice and shredded them before her eyes. Pain stabbed upwards from her stomach, her chest. “Go away!”
The thing paused. In the silence that developed Heather could have almost believed it had heeded her command, but she felt it there on the other side of the door, staring into the wood like she herself did now. She felt it thinking. Of what it wanted to say next.
No, not thinking. Ransacking. Because Mike is dead, Mike is gone, and this thing is in his body. It’s rifling through his brain like a burglar. Searching his memories.
And finding them.
“You were going to leave me,” it said. “You wanted me to go away. But you went away instead. Do you know what happened to me, Babydoll? Do you know how I got like this?”
“GO AWAY!”
“I thought you’d come home early because you were sorry for what you’d said and so I opened the door. Because I thought it was you.”
“SHUT UP!”
“Because we belong together. Because I know that. You do, too.”
She pressed her face into the crown of Amber’s head. Her daughter’s hair smelled smoky from the campfires they had lit in the woods, back when Mike was Mike and the world made a modicum of sense.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said. “We’ll sleep in the bathroom. Where we can’t hear him.”
Amber cried. “What’s wrong with him?”
Heather swallowed.
“It’s not him anymore,” she said. “That thing…is a vampire.”
7.
In a world without black crosses on doors, Amber had fallen in love with a boy named Collin Wells. Tall, with black hair and green eyes as sharp as broken glass, Collin was a year ahead of her and ran with a more affluent crowd—civilian kids who never had to ride the bus and wore nice new clothes even though they didn’t have after-school jobs. They wore hats and sweatshirts from big-name colleges because everybody understood that when high sc
hool ended, these people were going somewhere.
Collin himself had set his sights on the University of Virginia, something none of her previous boyfriends had even considered. He would major in political science and go to work in Washington, D.C., he told her. Then law school. He would be a senator someday. This made perfect sense, because Collin’s grandfather had been a senator, and his father sat on the board at the largest shipping firm in Norfolk. Collin himself was vice-president of the National Honor Society. He played soccer and lacrosse. And he was so good-looking that when he’d approached her in the hallway and started talking to her one day, she almost couldn’t talk back.
“Just remember that nobody shits roses,” her friend Tara Beasley said one night on the phone. “And he’s going to dump your ass as soon as you don’t put out. You’re a Navy girl, but you’re also an enlisted Navy girl, which to these guys means two things: one, your family is broke. Two, you’re easy. That’s what all these preps think—that we’re trash. And as soon as he figures out you’re not trash, that you don’t give out blowjobs like Halloween candy, this is going to be over. So don’t put too much of yourself into it, okay?”
But Tara had been wrong. The last semester of Amber’s junior and his senior year aged like a fine wine. Prom came and went. But as graduation approached Collin grew quieter, more distant. So much so that at commencement, she could have cried when he walked across the stage, would have cried had she not been sitting right next to his mother and father. He was leaving, she understood. He would meet someone at UVA. The girls would all pounce on him before he even got his clothes unpacked, because Collin wasn’t just deep, Collin wasn’t just real, Collin was gorgeous. And these wouldn’t be just any girls. College girls. Holy Grails with feet.
Break up now, Tara texted her. Save yrself the wait.
She thought about that. She really did. But at his graduation party, she caught him brooding in the kitchen. She pulled him out onto the back porch to find out why.
“Everything’s ending,” he said, near tears. The wetness in his eyes had taken her by surprise; she had thought him plotting their breakup, engineering a way to let her down easy. “I love you, Amber, but it’s all falling down! I’m leaving. I’m going off to Charlottesville, my parents won’t let me take my car and I won’t have any way of coming to see you. It’s going to be hell!”
He just said he loved me.
“Are you saying you want to break up?”
“No! No! I just…I don’t know how I’m going to make it! When I go off, it’s going to be weeks before we can see each other again!”
She threw her arms around him then because she’d started crying, too. The back door opened. Two of his friends stepped out and quickly darted back inside. Collin didn’t even turn his head or flinch when the door squealed. He appreciated the gravity of this moment, she knew. This crossroads.
“My dad sails on a submarine,” she murmured. “Sometimes he goes away and we don’t see him for three months. But him and my mom have stayed married for over twenty years.”
“What are you saying?” he asked thickly.
“I’m saying you and I are going to be fine.”
He hugged her even tighter. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
“I’ll die before I let you go,” he said.
He eventually released her physically, but in a sense they remained together in that kitchen all summer. The season passed like something out of one of the country songs they listened to during long afternoons on the beach, hot evenings with the windows down on the expressway. When more creative people experienced something like this, they had to sing about it or explode.
She cried when he left in August and so did he. But the parting didn’t bring the pain she had always feared, because they both knew it was temporary. Because even though nobody expected they’d make it, they knew differently. They were special. A little intense, maybe, but that was okay. Monogamy was hard, especially for guys. Intensity was a good thing.
“We belong together,” he proclaimed in her driveway the night before he shipped out for Charlottesville. “But we need to be careful as we get used to the distance, you know?”
Amber indicated that she indeed knew.
“Because guys are worms,” he said. “Girls can be sneaky, but guys are frigging worms—they see a girl they want and it’s like suddenly there’s no such thing as common decency anymore. You especially have to watch yourself. As soon as I’m gone, dudes are going to be all over you.”
“Believe me, that’s not true.”
“It is. You’re the most beautiful girl at that whole school, Amber. At any school. So they’re going to start calling you. They’re going to start inviting you places. It’ll start out all innocent at first, but what they’re doing is worming—working on you. Confusing you. Making you question things. And before you know it, you’ll forget all about me.”
“Never,” she swore.
“Promise me, then,” he said.
“Promise you what?”
“That you’ll be strong. Against the worm.”
So she promised, and she remained good to her word. She actively avoided boys after he left and started staying in on weekends instead of running around with Tara and the rest. She actively avoided the crowd Collin had introduced her to, because there were a few guys in that group, he said, who always looked at her a little too much and a little too long and he didn’t trust them for one second.
So she didn’t go to parties and she didn’t go to dances and she really didn’t have time to talk to any of these potential worms on the phone because with Collin so far away, the only times she ever got to talk or Skype with him were evenings and weekends. The worms Collin feared never got near her, because she stayed out of the soil.
And things went well. They had their arguments like any couple did, but never anything fatal; Collin, being far away, naturally felt a little insecure and threw a fit every now and then. Small fits, minor tantrums. Nothing they didn’t get past before getting off the phone. And as the autumn of her senior year unwound, he started talking about marriage. How that could work.
And then it all went to shit.
Tara Beasley showed up on her front porch one Friday night after dinner in mid-October and demanded a meeting in Amber’s room. She’d come over to bitch about Collin. More specifically, how Amber had ditched her girls for this guy, how it wasn’t healthy, how it was weird, how everybody was talking about her now like she had a disease or some shit, people were getting miffed about her blowing them off all the time, blah, blah blah. Typical jealous girl stuff. Amber sought a breather under the guise of going downstairs to get them drinks. She tarried in the kitchen until she could tarry no longer, then returned to her room with a pair of Diet Cokes. There, she found Tara scrolling through her iPhone.
Should have took it down with you, you should keep it with you at all times, because people are worms and they’ll try to come between us.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Tara looked up, white-faced, eyebrows knit together. She shook her head slowly. “Amber…”
“What are you doing with my phone? Put that down!” She snatched the phone from Tara’s hands. Tara flinched. “Who told you you could look at all my shit?”
“What is going on with you?”
Amber glanced down at the screen. “What the fuck, Tara?”
Girls will worm, too. Sometimes they’re even worse, because they’re not after your body, they’re after your soul. They can’t stand to see you happy with a guy. They want you alone and miserable, like them.
“Amber…absolutely none of that is normal. I mean…my God, how can you listen to him talk like that? What’s all this shit about worms?”
“How would you know what’s normal?” Amber shot back. “Have you ever kept a boyfriend for longer than a month? Ever? You ever gotten a valentine from the same guy that gave you a Christmas card?”
“He’s keeping track of your movements! You’r
e having to tell him where you are every hour of every…”
“I don’t have to tell him shit,” Amber spat. Her hands shook. “He’s just concerned. He cares about me!”
“He’s fucking psycho! Jesus Christ, Amber, who the hell says things like…”
Tara snatched the phone back and began scrolling through the screen, backing around the room to stay away from Amber.
“Like, ‘If you break up with me, I’ll kill us both?’ Like, ‘I would rather blow my own brains out than see you with another guy?’ Oh, and here’s a good one from yesterday, ‘I’ll shoot everybody at that school before I let someone take you from me.’ This is what you call ‘having a boyfriend?’”
Amber began to shake harder then. Tears welled in her eyes and her face burned. She wanted to leap forward and tear the phone from Tara’s hands again, smack her across the face for this invasion of her privacy. Make Tara go away and leave her alone. Forever.
So she’d never have to listen to those things out loud again.
“I love him,” she whispered. “He loves me. That’s why he says that, because he’s scared for our relationship, he doesn’t really mean it…”
“He’s sick,” Tara said. “And so are you. You need help, Amber. You need it now.”
Amber’s mind launched a hundred thoughts at once—complex thoughts, a little jumbled, but taken together they explained the intricate dance that was her relationship with Collin. Explained him, explained her, explained his intensity, his raw emotion, his kooky messages. Tara would understand, Amber thought, if she could only explain. But her mouth mutinied, and these thoughts crashed together in the back of her throat, where they formed a lump that would not let her speak.
“Let me show this to your mom. Can I do that? We can show her together.”
Amber stared at the phone. Her skin was numb, her fingertips cold. Her eyes felt red and wet and she knew without looking that her mascara—mascara, at home, on a weeknight, because Collin liked to see her that way—was running. She probably looked like a raccoon. Or worse.
The Last Days of October Page 4
