The Last Days of October (4 page)

5.

Heather had no
parents.
 
She’d had them once, but only
for a short while; they existed only in halting flashes of memory that churned
intense feelings but provided little else.
 
Framed photographs of her mother that stood on almost every flat surface
in her grandmother’s house in Wilmington showed a pretty young woman with long,
straight hair parted down the middle.
 
Heather grew up and her grandmother grew older, but the woman in the
pictures didn’t age.
 
She watched the
progress of years from within the four corners of these reddish-tinged
photographs, where nothing changed and time remained static.
 

But she had no
pictures of her father.
 
Her grandmother
and the various family members who occasionally visited did not speak of him or
even hint at his existence.
 
Consequently, Heather never thought to even ask about him until
kindergarten, when her classmates spoke of their fathers and it occurred to her
that logically, she must have had one too.
 
Even if he had, as she understood, died at the same time as her mother.

So on the way home
from school one fall afternoon, she asked, “Grandma, can I have a picture of my
daddy?”

Her grandmother
stiffened visibly behind the wheel of her Buick LeSabre.
 
The color drained from her face, and in that
instant Heather felt a flash of guilt.

“No, sweetie.
 
We don’t have any pictures of your
daddy.
 
They’re all gone.”

“Can you call his
mommy and daddy?
 
They might have
pictures of him.
 
Maybe they can give me
one.”

Her grandmother’s
hands became white-knuckled claws around the skinny steering wheel.
 
For a long time, she didn’t speak.
 
Heather tried furiously to rewind time and
un-ask the question.

“We can’t do
that,” she said.
 
“His mommy and daddy
are gone, too.”

The truth came to
light later, of course; it was bound to, if for no other reason than a small
child gets older and necessarily curious about her own identity.
 
Her grandmother had understood this, and as
Wilmington had still been a relatively small town in those days understood also
that someone would eventually say something.
 
And so she had told Heather, one night in her third grade year, why she
had no pictures of her father.

“He was evil,” her
grandmother said.
 
“He was wicked, he was
evil and he used to beat your mommy up on a regular basis.
 
And finally, he killed her.
 
She tried to leave him and he killed her with
a gun.
 
Then he killed himself, because
not only was he evil, not only was he wicked, but he was also a coward who
didn’t want to face what he had coming.”

The revelation
detonated like an artillery shell.
 
She
watched her grandmother shake and cry as she said it, and she tried to connect
with that same depth of feeling.
 
But she
was numb.

“He wanted to kill
you, too, but your mommy saved you.
 
She
put you in the closet when she heard him coming.
 
She covered you with clothes and told you to
be quiet.
 
And you did what you were
told.
 
Because you were a good little
girl.
 
You always did what you were
told.”

She lay now on the
sofa, which she and Amber had propelled back into its proper place after
unloading the Durango.
 
Amber lay sleeping in her bed upstairs.
 
Heather had started out curled up beside her
but couldn’t sleep, so she came downstairs for a nip from the whiskey bottle in
the pantry.
 
It hadn’t helped.

Surrendering
herself to wakefulness, she fell onto the couch, where the tears came.
 
Her grandmother hadn’t liked Mike, but she
hadn’t known him.
 
Not really.
 
She had known Heather’s father and assumed
the daughter would pick someone just like him, but that wasn’t fair.
 
Because Mike
got
it.
 
An orphan himself,
he understood her in ways no one else could.

He hadn’t been a
bad husband, far from it.
 
Things had
gone poorly as of late, but they had simply reached that difficult period all
Navy marriages face when the sailor comes home for good.
 
The point where the rest of one’s life
begins, the end of the era where peace comes as easily as the start of the next
cruise.
 
Changes.
 
Of course they’d be difficult.
 
Of course they’d both have trouble with
it.
 
Mike would naturally have had more
than anyone because the Navy had been the closest thing to a family he’d ever
experienced and for him, leaving the service had resembled a death.
 
So of course he’d grown a little more clingy,
needy.
 
Controlling, even; all the things
she’d ever hated in him.
 
But it was just
a phase.

You stupid, selfish bitch.

Indeed.
 
Had she approached this with a modicum of
understanding, she’d have realized what was going on and done something to
change it.
 
She’d have stopped picking
fights, stopped her passive-aggressive needling.
 
Maybe she would have found something to like
about Deep Creek instead of stewing in the house all day counting the reasons
she didn’t want to live here.
 
Mike had
lost his temper and trashed the kitchen.
 
But she’d done nothing to help...

Something rustled
in the leaves outside.

Her eyes darted to
the window above the couch, her heart rate rising.
 
Beyond the glass, a pair of trees stood in
naked silence.
 
She stared at them, and
then she heard the noise again: a creeping, rustling sound.
 
Crunching.
 
An animal in the bushes below; a raccoon, perhaps, or a squirrel.
 
A neighborhood cat, lost and confused.
 
Wind in the dead leaves.
 

She rose from the
couch, slowly so as to minimize the creaking of the floorboards.
 
She took the pistol from where she’d laid it
on the coffee table, turned and reached for the blinds.

The noise came
again.
 
She thought of the empty yards
and open doors.
 
The crosses.
 

Something else her
grandmother had said echoed in her skull.
 
Nothing good ever happens after
dark
.
 
All the good folks are in bed.

She backed away
from the window.
 
The floorboards
screamed under her shifting weight.
 
She
wanted to scream back at them to be quiet.
 
Above her head, footsteps crossed the ceiling and a door creaked
open.
 
Amber getting up.
 
Making enough noise to wake the dead in the
process.
 

Heather darted
into the foyer to the bottom of the stairs.
 
The front door, windowless and silent, was a black hole in the
darkness.
 
Beyond it, the porch creaked
with the presence of someone walking on it.

She leveled the
pistol at the front door.

“There are people
outside,” Amber whispered, descending the stairs and joining her in the
foyer.
 
“A bunch of them standing in the
yard.”

“Who are
they?
 
Are they armed?”

“I can’t really
see them,” she said.
 
Her lips were a
tight line of worry, her arms coiled around her chest in a self-administered
hug.
 
“Too dark.”

Heather
swallowed.
 
The creaking had
stopped.
 
Whoever was out there stood now
just beyond the door.
 
Marauders, she
thought, lawless survivors of whatever had gone down in Deep Creek while they
were away.
 
They had seen two lone
females earlier today and came now in the night to surprise them as they slept,
to drag them away for who knew what purpose.
 

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.”