The Last Days of October

by Bell, Jackson Spencer

  Doors opened.

  We should have kept going, she thought. We should have gone deeper, made it harder for them. They’re right on top of us.

  A moment passed, and then another. And then Mike spoke.

  “We know where you are.”

  Behind her, Amber breathed in audibly and Heather cursed the noise. But she said nothing. She couldn’t.

  “You left footprints in the ground. Led us right here. You’re behind that fallen tree in there.”

  Put their heads together, she thought wildly. Face to face, cheek to cheek, stick the gun up to Amber’s head and pull the trigger. Kill them both with one bullet.

  But the bullet could deflect, killing Amber and either missing Justin completely or lodging itself somewhere crazy that didn’t kill him but left him flopping around on the forest floor in seizures while those things took him. His last moments would be agony.

  There was no way out of this.

  Tears of despair and frustration began streaming down her face. All her shortcomings made their way to her eyes and expressed themselves on her cheeks.

  “Mom,” Amber whispered. Her voice was wet, like the ground that had betrayed them. “I want you to shoot me now.”

  “And if you’ve got any extras,” Justin said, “I’ll take one, too.”

  The wind picked up then, rustling the leaves and blowing strands of hair across her face. It chilled her skin and penetrated her inadequate jacket. Why don’t they just charge in here and end the whole thing? She wondered. Why prolong this moment? They had nothing with which to fight. A few sticks. And a pistol with only one bullet.

  He doesn’t know that.

  Her breath caught.

  He knows you have a gun. And he’s afraid you’ll use it on yourself.

  She sat up. A platoon of a dozen or more of the creatures had fanned out across the landscape before her, Mike standing slightly forward at their center.

  “Give yourself to me,” Mike said, “and we’ll let the others go.”

  “And I should believe you because…”

  “Because you’ve got no choice,” he said. His voice was dead and papery but stronger now, fuller.

  “Oh, but I do,” she said. “I have this gun. I can shoot Justin, I can shoot Amber and I can shoot myself and you won’t get shit. How does that sound? So don’t you stand there and tell me I have no choice, you prick. This is a negotiation. I have something you want.”

  He remained silent for a moment before saying, “What do you propose?”

  “You can have me if you let the kids go.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you let them go first.”

  It hesitated again.

  “Of course.”

  He had no intentions of keeping any promises. Heather had to play this just right. Because if she didn’t…

  “Heather?” Justin asked. “What are you doing?”

  “Go far away,” she whispered. “Find a place to pull off, then hunker down and spend the night.”

  “But…” Amber protested.

  “When I get up, stand behind me. Do as I say. Both of you.”

  Slowly, she rose. Her legs wobbled, wasted by the hard sprint across the field and weakened by fear. But they held her up. The vampires made a tittering noise as the children rose, too.

  She raised the pistol to her head.

  “Here’s how this works,” she called out. “The kids get to go. When they’re good and gone, you can have me. That’s what you want, right?”

  None of the vampires moved.

  “Yes,” Mike said at last.

  If it calls your bluff, your child is finished.

  Eternity is a long time.

  “Throw us the keys to those cars,” she said.

  A set of keys flew out of the darkness and struck her on the shins.

  “All of them,” she said.

  Tittering from Mike’s little tribe. Two more sets landed at her feet.

  “Amber,” she said, “pick up all the keys. Pick a car, take it and go.”

  “Mom…”

  “Do it!” She kissed Amber on the head as she passed, then did the same to Justin. This had to look like a final goodbye. “I love you more than you’ll ever understand,” she said softly. To Justin, she said, “I haven’t known you long, but I can tell who you are. You’re a good man. You’re going to take good care of her. I know it.”

  Amber began to cry. Justin, face taut and shocked, just blinked.

  “Now go!”

  Justin grabbed her jacket and pulled her onward. The vampires watched them move along the tree line and circle back to the nearest car. The lights came on, and it backed up.

  Mike stepped forward.

  She raised the pistol to her head again. “Stop.”

  “We kept our word,” he said. “Time for you to keep yours.”

  “They’re not gone yet.”

  The car rumbled across the field to the highway, where it turned north and sped off into the night.

  “They’re gone now,” Mike growled.

  “And you have two cars left,” Heather retorted. “How do I know you don’t have any extra keys?”

  “We don’t!”

  “Then why don’t we just wait for a while to make sure? Give them a good head start. Just in case. No rush, right? It’s a long night.”

  They remained that way for a long time, a collection of statues at the forest’s edge. Beholden to their master, Mike’s followers fidgeted but didn’t move. Another October breeze rustled through the forest behind Heather and blew across the open field, carrying that earthy smell. She felt it against her back like a set of gentle hands holding her up. Helping her stand up straight.

  “How long are we going to do this?” Mike asked.

  “As long as it takes,” she replied.

  “I can come for you right now,” it said.

  “I know.”

  “I can make you shoot yourself.”

  “You sure can. And then I’ll be gone.”

  Mike stood there, unable to give up his prize, as did the others. They remained in place as the breeze blew and the leaves rustled and the cold steel of the gun barrel against her skull warmed to skin temperature and nothing, not even time itself, moved.

  But the Earth turned, and time did move. Dawn came slowly, but when it did, Mike’s followers began falling back towards the farmhouse in the distance, the one she’d eschewed in favor of the woods. Mike remained, fists clenched.

  “You think you’re smart,” he said, “but you’re not. I could take you now and make you shoot yourself, but you won’t get off that easily. Tomorrow, we’ll come again. We’ll all go home, spend some time together. You can watch me remove Amber’s limbs one piece at a time. While she’s still alive.”

  Her back, her neck, her whole body hurt from standing all night; only her feet, numb blocks of ice at the end of her legs, didn’t. “But you won’t do that tonight. Or, shall I say, this morning?”

  He stared at her with black menace, but not for long. As the harvested field lightened in color with the onset of dawn, he fell back to the farmhouse with the others. They remained on the porch until dawn broke in full and the sun reached for them across the yard. Then they retreated inside.

  Heather staggered to the road. She climbed into the disabled truck, the one that had nearly screwed them all into an early death. She rested for a long time, letting the sun warm the air inside the cab. And then she fell asleep.

  27.

  They drove north until they hit the outskirts of Yanceyville, where Justin veered off on a side road. Amber sat beside him with her head resting against the window glass, staring off into space. He asked her once if she cared where they went. When she answered with nothing more than a shrug, he decided that further conversation was futile. He concentrated on driving and staring into the rearview mirror. Several sets of keys pressed against his skin from inside his jeans pockets, but he couldn’t be sure the vampires hadn’t kept spares. When they g
ot done with Heather…

  “Think he’ll keep his word?” Amber asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “My dad. Do you think that since he has my mom now, he’ll keep his word and let us go? Do we have to worry about him chasing us now?”

  Justin frowned. Amber’s face and voice had a slack, detached quality he didn’t much care for. He’d seen it on his own face, heard it in his own voice, when his father died. Shock, he thought. Separation of the self from one’s current reality. A certain degree of protective apathy. In his case, it had kept him on the couch for days, head spinning like a broken compass. If a compass could even break; Justin didn’t know. A person could break, though. He knew that.

  “I can’t say,” he said cautiously. “You know him better than I do.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “Not really. I don’t think I ever really knew him at all.”

  Sighing, Justin looked down at the dashboard. They had snatched a battered old minivan that reeked of cigarettes, and while it ran and drove reasonably well the fuel level indicator had begun sinking sharply once it passed the half-full mark. It now read one quarter, which he didn’t trust to carry them through the night. His father’s truck had been like that; long legs on the first half tank, Tyrannosaurus Rex arms on the last. They’d have to find a place to stop for what remained of the night or risk getting stranded on a well-traveled thoroughfare. And now that he knew vampires could drive cars, the main roads had become even more dangerous.

  He slowed and took the next left. The pavement beneath their tires became rough, the state’s lack of give-a-shit about this particular area of the county evident in every thumping pothole. Few manmade works spoke to the presence of humanity out here; other than the road itself and the occasional guardrail, this could have been virgin forest. He cut off the headlights and slowed to a crawl. He found a place where the trees receded back from the road enough to where he could pull the van off without dumping it in the drainage ditch. Then he switched off the motor. He laid a hand on the door handle and was about to open it when his arm stopped responding on its own.

  What are you doing? It asked.

  Getting out, he replied. We’re going to go hide in the woods. Open the goddamn door.

  You ever thought about what happened to the animals?

  His breath caught in his throat. True; very true. He’d seen a vampire dog today. What if there were other things? Something as small as a field mouse could turn him into a Mike or a Kayleigh. He had no way of knowing anything about the current condition of the local wildlife. Some animals had always hunted at night; maybe they all did now.

  He shot a look out the window at the deserted road. The dark road. It’s not safe out here, he thought, his insides shuddering in a way that bordered on panic.

  It’s not safe anywhere, his recalcitrant arm shot back. Keep your ass in the van.

  “I want to leave them alone,” Amber said.

  He turned his head to look at her. She stared out the windshield at something only she could see—a thought or a memory dancing there to the rustling of dead leaves and the soft ticking of metal as the engine cooled. “You mean…”

  “My mom and dad. In the morning, I want us to just leave. I thought I would want to burn the house down so they wouldn’t have to live like that anymore, but I don’t think I can do it. Pretty soon, they’re going to starve anyway. I want to just let nature take its course and let them die off with all the rest.”

  She didn’t look back at him. Whatever she was seeing held her attention so deeply that she spoke without turning her head, Justin a being that existed only on her periphery. He was an afterthought in this moment, a side dish that could interact but whose thoughts and words mattered little in the presence of something far more important. Still, he had to admit that there were worse places to be right now than with her. Her gentle features cut away just enough of the darkness to reveal echoes of Heather in the rise and fall of her cheekbones and the way her mouth tied it all together. She was a beautiful girl. Kayleigh had been pretty, but Amber was incredible—it was almost impossible to compare them in the same language. He became suddenly conscious of a powerful desire to keep her safe and wondered then if it was some sort of biological reaction to one of the world’s last females or if there was something special about her that could make him feel this way. Maybe another angle of the same something that had motivated Heather to sacrifice herself to Mike and his Band of Merry Vampire Fucknuts to save her. Heather had marched straight into Hell without looking back, all for this girl right here.

  He thought about the kind of love that would lead someone to do that, and he tried to picture what it must have felt like to lose it. He couldn’t.

  “I am so selfish,” she said with a bitter little laugh. “I mean, she cared enough about me to do that. And you know what? In a sense, she’s been doing it my whole life. Sacrificing herself to him, I mean. She could have left him a long time ago, but she didn’t because she had me. She could have shot herself just now, but she didn’t. Because I had to escape. And I can’t even bring myself to strike a match for her. Isn’t that messed up?”

  Justin shrugged. He wondered if he would ever have a normal conversation with another person ever again. If he never got to talk about basketball, or trucks, or music. If everything was always going to be so heavy all the frigging time. “You don’t want to torch your parents,” he said. “I think that’s a healthy feeling.”

  “It’s cowardly. I don’t want her to be in pain. But if I don’t…then she’ll be like that. And before too long, she’ll get skinny. They’ll run out of food and die of starvation.”

  “Your dad wasn’t skinny. Neither were his buddies.”

  “Because they’re at the top of the chain. Whatever’s left, they get it. When that’s gone…” She trailed off.

  Right. When that was gone, they would degenerate into bags of bones that charged out into the open sunlight in hopes of a meal. Like running into a bonfire to grab a hamburger—yet another depth of feeling that he couldn’t imagine. But Heather would; Amber was right about that. When the chow finally ran out—wherever Mike and Company were getting theirs—all of those creatures would understand it very, very well.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “You won’t have to. I’ll do it for you.”

  She looked at him.

  “If she didn’t use the gun on herself as soon as we were out of there,” he continued, “she’ll likely be somewhere nearby. The nearest house or tobacco shed, they’ll all be in there. I’ll burn everything around there. Then I’ll burn your house, just in case they made it back there.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I want to just go.”

  “I’ll drop you off somewhere so you don’t have to listen to it.”

  “I don’t want you to leave me. Can we just go? In the morning, can we just…go down to Fayetteville and look for the army?”

  He sighed and shrugged again.

  “Sure.”

  She nodded slowly and looked out the window again. “I can’t believe I’m like this,” she said. “I should be a complete wreck. I can’t believe I’m not.”

  “You’re in shock,” he replied. “Try to enjoy it. It doesn’t last forever.”

  28.

  At dawn, the sun rose with such a lack of energy that Justin half expected it to grab a toilet bowl and barf up the remnants of the malt liquor and boxed wine it had consumed the night before. Amber didn’t awaken when he opened the door to the cold morning, so he took the opportunity to step behind the van and urinate on the side of the road. It took him a while to get started—his bladder kept thinking someone was going to come along at any moment and see his junk dangling out of his zipper—but when he did it came in a great, satisfying stream.

  Amber was still asleep when he climbed back inside. He briefly considered waking her, then decided against it; this would be her first morning as an orphan. The longer she didn’t have to face that, the better.
So he started the van and worked his way back to Highway 49, where he turned south towards Deep Creek. He didn’t want to go back there, not really, but they would have to pass through town to get to the interstate. And there was no one there anymore, he reminded himself. He would see nothing.

  The ancient truck that had quit on them approached on the left. Ahead of it, an old farmhouse, ancient itself but obviously still inhabited at some point in the recent past. Justin noticed the drawn curtains as it flashed by and thought, they’re in there.

  He shuddered. But he kept driving.

  Ten minutes later, the Shell station appeared up ahead and Justin realized that he was hungry. He slowed and noticed for the first time a shudder when the van downshifted. Telltale signs of a failing transmission—at least this vehicle was warning them. He decided they would stop at the house and get his truck. Grab all the gasoline they could siphon out of the neighbors’ rides and get back on the road.

  But first, chips and beef jerky. He pulled in beneath the awning and switched off the ignition. Amber changed positions and opened her eyes groggily, rising like the sun before her. She stared at him for a moment before asking, “What are we doing?”

  “Getting breakfast. We’re at the Shell station. You want some peanuts or something?”

  She shook her head and closed her eyes again.

  “You need to eat.”

  No response.

  Sighing, he exited the van and walked across the blacktop and slowly entered the convenience store. The glass front admitted the explosion of sunlight that had accompanied full morning, and everything in reach of the window glowed gold. Darkened drink coolers set in the back wall reminded him of Wal-Mart, however, and so he stuck to the immediate vicinity of the cash register. He grabbed a bag from behind the counter and began filling it with tubes of peanuts and almonds, crackers and jerky. Little Debbie snack cakes. Good, healthy stuff.

  If the vampires don’t get us, he thought, this shit surely will.