“Amber? What do you think?”
Slowly, hesitantly, she nodded.
“Okay.”
Mom hadn’t reacted well. Dad had been gone—as usual—so all of this fell on her. At night, Amber sometimes caught her crying at the kitchen table all alone, and it struck her as strange that her mother would experience such a personal reaction to something that wasn’t her problem at all. She acted like she’d caught Amber shooting heroin or smoking crack out of a glass pipe; she even talked about sending her “away” for the rest of her senior year. Like rehab or something. It made no sense.
Amber awoke now on the floor of the hall bathroom with her mind cloudy from dreams of Collin. Her back ached in that particular way a body complains when it doesn’t get enough sleep, partly because she’d slept on a bathroom floor, partly because it was cold as hell in here with the heat off. Miserly light wafted in from beneath the door. As her brain booted and loaded memories from the night before, her waking confusion cleared and her perception returned.
Crosses.
Everybody gone.
Vampire
She blinked, rubbed her eyes and shook her head. She stood and tried the light switch. When that did nothing but click, she rested her forehead against the cold wall and sighed. Her breath came out in a worn, ragged gust, but she didn’t cry; she’d done enough of that last night, her head in Mom’s lap. She’d cried enough to last her a long time.
You are one fucked-up bitch.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Collin’s voice there, speaking the truth as she knew it. She’d shot her father three times in the chest last night. He’d gotten up. He had fangs. And yet she’d dreamed about her ex-boyfriend. Not that other business, what was it…oh yeah, the end of the world. That she could even think about a guy right now said horrible things about her mind and the way it had chosen to organize her priorities. Tara would have slapped her.
Tara’s dead, the Collin in her head said. Like your dad. Like me. She walks with us.
She inhaled deeply and opened the door. In the hall, daylight lit the second floor. The glow in the bedroom windows suggested she’d gone crazy, because none of the things in her memory of the night before could have actually happened. But as she stood in the hallway, nothing challenged her awful feeling of sanity.
Because it is real, she thought. I can’t wrap my mind around how it’s even remotely possible, but I’m living it.
“Mom?” She called. Hearing no answer, she felt her chest tightening before yet another horrifying uncertainty: where was her mother? She had hidden in the bathroom with Amber last night, after they left Dad out there on the porch to do whatever it was vampires did when people told them to fuck off. But where was she now?
Did she go after him?
Amber stared across the hall into her bedroom. On the table beside her bed, their last family picture stared back at her from its silver frame. She and Mom in simple, formal dresses they never wore, Dad in his Navy blues. The two of them standing behind her, each with a hand on her shoulder. Smiling.
She wouldn’t have done that, Amber thought.
She’s in love, Collin retorted.
He’s a vampire.
She’s a girl. Girls put up with all kinds of stupid shit when they’re in love. You ought to know.
Shut up. Go stalk somebody.
She realized her lips were moving then, like Mom’s did when she talked to herself. It made her look crazy, and her face reddened even though no one could see her. She descended the stairs. In the kitchen, a bag of Halloween candy sat open on the table. The good stuff: Twix, Kit-Kats, M&Ms. Amber breathed a sigh of relief. No one, not even Mom, would stop for a snack before running away with a vampire.
She grabbed a few pieces for herself and stepped outside on the front porch. A noise around the corner prompted her to check the side of the house, where she found Mom closing the crawlspace door.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Mom looked up, startled. Her hand shot up in a stop gesture when Amber swung her legs over the railing and dropped to the ground. “Don’t come over here.”
“Why?”
“Stay away from the crawlspace,” Mom commanded. “I don’t want you going near it.”
Frowning, Amber ignored her and walked half the depth of the house to where her mother stood beside the squat little crawlspace door. Mom stood beside the hose cart, with a brand-new hose neatly rolled into a coil. Amber blinked at it and felt a sharp stab of pain in her abdomen; she had accompanied Dad to the hardware store when he’d bought it.
“I told you not to come over here,” Mom said.
Amber shrugged. “What’s with the crawlspace?”
She reached for the door, but Mom’s hand shot out and pushed hers away like a woman batting a toddler away from a hot stove. The sleeve of her sweater retracted to reveal a bright white bandage over her inner forearm. Amber blinked at this.
“Do NOT open that!” Mom barked. “Do you understand me?”
She blinked, stunned by her mother’s tone. And the bandage. Crossing her arms again, she glanced at the door.
“He’s under there,” she said. A statement, not a question.
Mom closed her eyes and nodded.
A breeze blew down between the houses but it was a gentle breeze from the sunny street, warmer than the air presently surrounding them. Still, Amber suddenly felt very, very cold. She thought of the creature she had seen on the porch last night. It rested now beneath the house. She could see it there, white skin dotted with flies, stinking and still, hands clasped over its abdomen. Staring at the floor joists above it, sleeping with its eyes open.
Waiting for sundown.
A moment passed before she could speak. When she did, her voice felt gravelly, dry like the leaves beneath her feet. “Anyone else or just him?”
“I don’t know. And we’re not going to find out. We’re going to stay away from this door and forget all about it.”
“Are you going to get a lock for it?” Amber asked.
Mom stared at her.
“Why would I lock it?”
“Because if you don’t, he—it—is just going to get out tonight and come banging on the door again.”
And honestly, she didn’t add, I don’t fully trust you to not let him in.
“And if I do,” Mom replied, “he’ll be trapped in there. And eventually, he’ll starve.”
Amber thought of the bandage. Her eyes narrowed. “What’s with the bandage on your arm?”
“Accident before you got up. I cut myself.”
“Accident? Sure you’re not trying to feed him?”
Mom’s face twisted into an indignant scowl. “That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it?”
Mom said nothing. For a moment they just stood there, staring at each other. Amber noticed then the redness in Mom’s eyes and understood that she’d been crying.
Like you ought to be, said a voice inside her. He’s your father, or was. Don’t you care? Doesn’t this bother you at all?
She looked away, closing her eyes and willing the voice away. It did bother her, but not enough. She tasted traces of chocolate in her mouth and realized that she had woken up the morning after shooting her own father and had eaten candy. Candy could still taste good and it could still grab her interest because she didn’t really care about this, not in the way she should have. There had to be something wrong with a soul that could see her father as a vampire, shoot him and still pig out the next morning on junk.
Like I said, pronounced the Collin in her head, you are one fucked-up bitch.
She threw a look over her shoulder at the deserted street behind her. Unmolested by passing cars, dead leaves gathered freely on the blacktop.
Dead, she thought. Like Dad. They’re all dead and they’re all laying there and that’s where they’ll rot. Everything will rot.
“What do we do now?” she asked, temporarily banishing such thoughts. Another sign that something was wrong with her; she
should have been a wreck.
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t do ‘I don’t know,’ Mom. We have to have a plan, because if we don’t have a plan, we don’t…”
Mom interrupted her. “It’s the best I can do right now,” she said. “And I think what we really need at the moment is…to think. Think about this. Process it. We need to do that before we make any decisions. So we don’t make a bad one.”
She paused again.
“And I think right now I’m going to go to the store. We’re out of fuel for the camp stove, and we could probably use some other things. We’ll have breakfast when I come back. And then we’ll…I don’t know. Talk. Figure this out.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No,” Mom said forcefully. “I want you to stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because I need some time alone, okay? I’m having trouble with this.”
So am I, Amber thought. But instead of saying it, she just shrugged and nodded. “Whatever.”
“I want you to stay inside. Don’t even come out on the porch. Not until I come back.”
She began walking around to the front of the house and the porch stairs. Amber followed her. “And what if you don’t come back? What if something gets you because you decided to go out all by yourself?”
“Then don’t come looking for me.”
8.
In one of Heather’s happiest memories, she sat with Mike on Virginia Beach one summer evening after work. This had been before Amber, before marriage, when they were both still in the Navy. They had little money but no responsibility, so when the week ended time belonged to them. They sat on the shore with their bottoms in the sand and their legs crossed beneath them. What sun remained shimmered in the dark band where the ocean soaked the sand and reached for the shells, driftwood and seaweed it had deposited ashore at a higher tide. Neither spoke.
She remembered listening to the shells chattering beneath the rush of waves. She watched the ocean roll forever in either direction—cleaning the beach, smoothing it, renewing it. The waning sunlight almost twinkled on the fine edges of his chin, his cheekbones. His features were gentle but strong, like him. He had spent the last two years of his minority on a farm in Morgan County, and despite his time on submarines his body still glowed from healthful work. He could do things; he knew things, like how to calm a horse and deliver a calf. She felt comfort in his commanding, capable presence. Every memory of loneliness and unimportance weakened in the salt air before it disappeared into the water. She remembered thinking it remarkable how she could feel so dark, so permanently alone, and then with the appearance of one person suddenly not feel that way anymore. How his presence could wash away the ruins of her past.
Now, years later, she felt the weight of his loss curving her spine as she made her way to the Durango, keys jangling in her hands. The self-inflicted cut on her arm ached like the memory of her last interaction with Mike. Conscious thought nearly impossible.
But present circumstances afforded her little room for grieving. Amber was right; they needed a plan. I don’t know, we’ll talk about that later would work for a while, but time had become a precious currency in a world where reality bent at night. They had to figure out what to do here. They couldn’t be sitting clueless again when…
When he comes back.
Right.
The “check engine” light on her dashboard lit up again when she started the Durango. She considered abandoning the truck in favor of a newer vehicle plucked from some neighbor’s driveway, but this would have required her to enter their house to get the keys. Houses had closets and rooms without windows. Mike hadn’t remained in their home after his turning, but she couldn’t be sure the same applied to her neighbors. One of those things could jump her when she tried to steal its car. It could bite her, drink her blood.
Turn her into one of them.
Anyway, what was it Mike always said about “check engine” lights? Emissions control bullshit. Wouldn’t even be worth fixing if it didn’t have to pass inspection. Worry about it later.
Right, she thought. Later.
As she drove, her left arm stung where she had cut it. It burned like a brand—proof of her insanity. She had seen the crawlspace door slightly ajar this morning and realized immediately where Mike spent his days. And so, like any loving wife, she fed him. She got a knife and a rag from the kitchen and let the blood flow. For a moment, she thought she’d nicked a vein, she bled so much. But then the little river slowed, then stopped. She threw the rag under the house. She heard something scraping across the vapor barrier, and then she heard nothing. The rag must have satisfied him.
She drove slowly through town. Jack-o’lanterns smiled back at her from porches where no trick-or-treaters would tread this Halloween, smiling because they couldn’t turn around and look at the houses behind them. They couldn’t see the hideous black crosses on the doors. If they could do that, they wouldn’t grin anymore.
The first order of the day would be to locate other survivors, she thought. And there would be some—there had to be. If not here, then further down the highway in Burlington, which was at least three times the size of Deep Creek. Get on the interstate down there and make their way to the army base at Fort Bragg. The army would have established a disaster relief center, fortifications to keep people safe at night. They’d have things under control.
And hell, for all she knew this vampire business could be a purely local issue. They could ride down the road and run into a cordon of troops and military vehicles establishing a quarantine zone. Heather didn’t want her and Amber to have to stay in a quarantine zone, but knowing that one existed, knowing that the rest of the world hadn’t died along with the citizens of Deep Creek, would have been a relief.
There’s no quarantine zone. And this is not a local problem. You know that.
“We don’t know anything at this point,” Heather retorted aloud.
Yes, you do. Look at the sky and think: when was the last time there was a disaster and the skies weren’t buzzing with planes and helicopters?
She willed the voice silent.
Revolution Hardware downtown had a camping and outdoors section where she’d picked up supplies for their trip back when everything was normal. She remembered bottled water, racks of beef jerky and canned food. Water purification tablets, solar chargers, rechargeable batteries. Hurricane lanterns. All things they would need. She parked in a metered space in front of the store and grabbed the Ruger from the seat beside her as she got out. She was about to try the door when something reflected in the glass storefront caught her eye.
Directly behind her, the Morgan County Justice Building sat buffered from Third Street by a short green lawn and a sidewalk. A walkway wide enough for two cars to pass each other led from the glass entrance of the courthouse down to the street. In the center of the circle bulging at the midpoint of the walkway stood a concrete monument, inscribed with the names of Morgan County’s war dead. Benches sat on either side of the monument, well-kept evergreen shrubs lining the sidewalks to keep pedestrians from straying onto the grass.
And above the curb dangled the first of six bodies hanging by their necks from lamp posts. The first victim, slighter than the others, swayed back and forth with the tips of his shoes drawing invisible circles in the air. At this distance, the near invisibility of the hanging ropes made the bodies appear to float.
Oh my God.
In the picture window, the image of an unremarkable woman in faded jeans and an Old Dominion University sweatshirt shimmered like a ghost over the wheelbarrows and rakes and leaf blowers visible through the glass. The translucent figure blinked at her, her chest rising and falling with the slow rhythm of Heather’s own breath. She looked clueless.
She let her gaze float from the picture window to the City Center Drycleaners next door and Frizzell Bail Bonds just beyond that. Red-lettered “CLOSED” signs hung in the window of every door. The wind that had set the b
odies swaying dragged stray leaves across the street and sidewalk, making dry sounds like a hundred castanets. A low creaking noise joined the leaves, and it took her a moment to realize she was hearing the ropes from the hangmen’s nooses rubbing against the metal streetlamps.
She drew the pistol and walked slowly into the middle of the street. She recognized none of the bodies swaying from their ropes; their faces were purple, bug-eyed masks of strangled pain. Four men and two women, they hung there like sides of meat in a butcher shop. Which, at some point in the recent past, the courthouse district had become.
She shivered and turned back towards the hardware store. She had thought she would have to break a window to get inside, but someone else had pried open the door. The broken lock rattled as she pulled it open and stepped inside of Revolution Hardware. The store smelled as it always had, the pine-fresh scent of the lumber stacked in the back mixing with the tang of insecticide and the earthy stink of the organic fertilizers in bags up front. The overhead lights were dead, of course, but enough sun blazed through the storefront to illuminate everything with the full light of day. But for the silence, it could have been any other day.
But it wasn’t any other day. Behind the cash register, the glass-fronted cabinets that had held hunting rifles and ammunition were smashed and empty. Someone had come in here and cleaned them out.
Bet they’re out of spray paint and wooden stakes, too, she thought.
“Yeah, they probably are.”
Heather screamed and whirled around, drawing the Ruger from her waistband and aiming for the source of the voice. There in the doorway stood Clyde, Mike’s friend. Mike’s only friend, actually, that categorical scarcity the only reason she put up with him coming over. Mike needed friends. And if the only friend he could find was a little messy, a little drunk, a little I’m-going-to-stare-at-your-wife-when-you’re-not-looking, then okay. She could tolerate that. For him.
But Clyde didn’t look like a vampire, so this won him brownie points. She relaxed and lowered the pistol. “Jesus, Clyde, you scared the hell out of me!”
The Last Days of October Page 5
