The Last Days of October (20 page)

24.

Amber ate cold
beans out of a can.
 
They had left the
camp stove and cooking fuel in the Durango, but they wouldn’t have lit it even
if they’d brought it.
 
Mom was adamant:
no light.
 
And no sound.
 
So they ate in silence, speaking only when
necessary and even then in the most hushed of tones.
 
When they finished, they took turns using the
bathroom and gathered in the living room.
 

Justin
commandeered the recliner and quickly went to sleep.
 
Or pretended to, at least; he sat down and
closed his eyes, and Amber couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or laying there
worrying about what would happen next.
 
Nervous, Amber herself grabbed one of the couches but didn’t even try to
sleep.
 
It would have been useless.

“I let him
manipulate me again,” Mom said quietly.

She lay on her
side with her knees drawn up to her midsection.
 
She looked small and sounded even smaller, almost like a child.
 
This sent another wave of fear washing over
Amber’s insides.
 
“What do you mean?” she
asked.

“It was a
trick.
 
He played me.
 
Played us, but me most of all.
 
He did something to the truck to make it
break down.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Really?”
 
Mom sat up now and spun around to face her,
knees beneath her chin.
 
Her cheeks
glistened in the moonlight.
 
“Do you know
how long the check engine light’s been on in that thing?
 
Weeks.
 
Never a problem before, now all of a sudden BAM, it dies.
 
Where does it die?
 
On the highway at sunset.
 
He messed with it.
 
I know he did.
 
And I played right into it.”

Amber sighed and
shook her head.
 
“Mom…”

“He wanted us out
of that house because
he couldn’t get in
there
.
 
Now we’re out.
 
We can hide here, but it’s not ours.”

“We’re going to be
okay,” Amber said—even though she didn’t believe it.

“We’re not.
 
Not with me, we’re not.”
 
Mom closed her eyes and hung her head.
 
“I’m stupid, Amber.
 
I’m gullible.
 
I’m trusting.
 
I don’t really
think.
 
That’s what gets me the most, you
know?
 
He always criticized me for that,
not thinking.
 
Not
considering
, not
strategizing
.
 
He said I was impulsive and that this lack of
thought would someday ruin me, if I didn’t have him there to take the reins.”

She laughed
ruefully.
 
“I always thought he was just
being a pigheaded, sexist asshole.
 
But
he was right.”

“He wasn’t,” Amber
said.
 
“And neither are you.
 
You’re smart.
 
And I trust you.”

Mom opened her
mouth.
 
But before she could speak,
Justin sat straight up.

“Did you hear
that?”

She and Mom both
shook their heads.

“There’s something
outside,” he hissed.
 
“I hear branches
and leaves.”

Mom reached for
the Ruger.
 
Amber rose and listened.
 
She heard nothing, and in the silence her
muscles began to relax and her heart found a way to resume beating.

“Maybe it’s just
deer,” she offered quietly.

Somewhere on the
other end of the house, a window broke.

“They found us,”
Justin said.

The sound of breaking
glass reached Heather’s ears from somewhere down the hall, together with the
rustling of curtains and the sound of feet thumping on the floor.
 
The front door rattled.
 

Heather grabbed
Amber and pressed the truck keys into her hands.
 

A window broke in
the living room.
 
Glass showered the
floor.

Justin charged
forward with one of the broom handle stakes and buried it in the chest of a
skinny, spidery form that tore through the shadows.
 
It screeched in pain and fell writhing to the
floor.
 
Heather spotted another one
crawling in behind it and shot it once with the Ruger.
 
It fell backwards.

It got back up.

She grabbed Justin
by the shoulder and shoved him towards the kitchen.
 
He stumbled, almost falling in his haste.

Amber opened the
door to the garage.
 
In a horrifying
flash, Heather realized that she may have just sent the girl into any number of
those things—there was a window in there.
 
But movement in the front room seized and redirected her panic.
 
She aimed and fired twice.
 
Something fell, then scrambled back to a
standing position just as quickly.

Two more
materialized out of the hallway and she momentarily dropped them both.
 
Shell casings bounced off the wall to her
right and pinged on the vinyl kitchen floor.
 
One of them struck her cheek, burning it.
 
Smaller and weaker than the others, the
creatures struggled to get up.

They were children once.

Children or not,
the bullets slowed them but could not put them down for long.
 
“GO!” Heather screamed.

“I AM!”
 
Amber screamed back from somewhere in the
garage.

Another window
shattered, then another.
 
She wouldn’t be
able to hold them off, not for long.
 
How
many rounds remained in her magazine?
 
She
didn’t know.
 
She…

An unholy screech
to her left.
 
She glanced sideways and
sighted two more on the back porch, peering at her through the sliding glass
door.
 
The tallest raised his fist and
brought it down on the door.
 
A crack
appeared.
 

Go, go, go, go, GO

She backed into
the garage.
 
She stumbled, staggering
backwards until that overgrown lawnmower stopped her with a handle that jabbed
into her left kidney.
 
White-hot pain
exploded in her lower back.
 
Across the
threshold, in the kitchen, the sliding door gave way and showered the vinyl
with broken glass.
 
Pounding feet behind
it told her she had no time for pain, no time for anything.
 
No time.
 
She pivoted and ran at the truck.

Amber sat in the
driver’s seat, Justin beside her.
 
Eyes
wide, he looked like an owl.
 

“Drive!”
 
Heather barked.
 
“Now!”

To Amber, the
truck cab smelled like the tool shed at their house in Norfolk.

“Go on!” Justin
urged.
 
“Start it!”

The starter
spun.
 
The engine caught in a matter of
seconds, filling the garage with a smoke-belching roar.
 
It stumbled and she pressed on the gas to
hold it up.
 

Mom hopped into
the bed behind her and beat her fist once on the back window.
 

“GO!” she
yelled.
 
The pistol barked once,
twice.
 
Something in the doorway to the
kitchen wiggled and fell.
 
Amber looked
up at the garage door blocking their way.

“Drive through
it,” Justin urged.

She found the gear
selector and moved it until the little orange arrow at the bottom of the dash
hovered over D.

Two more gunshots,
each a peal of thunder that assaulted her ears and echoed in the confines of
her skull.
 

“GO!
 
NOW!”
 
Mom screamed.
 

Amber released the
brake and stomped on the gas.

The truck leapt
forward with a power she hadn’t expected; this was what the boys at school
would have called a “sleeper,” a drag racer in a redneck truck’s clothing.
 
Still, the garage had given her virtually no
room to accelerate and so when the front end collided with the garage door, the
metal caught the truck and held it there for an agonizing, bowed-out moment.

“Come on,” Justin
urged.

She dropped it
into reverse and backed up abruptly, only stopping when the rear bumper smashed
into the work bench and cabinets behind them.
 
Back into drive.
 
She pressed the
gas pedal and the truck charged forward.
 
It crashed into the now-ruined and bulging garage door.
 
Tortured metal crumpled, whined.

And gave way.
 

The truck exploded
into the driveway.
 
The passage through
the garage door had shattered one of the headlights, but in the one that
remained, Amber saw a pair of figures standing in her path.
 
Without a thought, she accelerated right
through them.
 
The truck shuddered on its
way over their bodies.
 

She had expected
hundreds of the things, a horde like the zombies wandering the mall parking lot
in
Day of the Dead.
 
But less than a dozen creatures waited
outside, all of them turning to follow the truck as it tore past them and
headed for the highway.
 
They gave
chase.
 

Mom fired three,
four, five times and stopped.
 
Amber
slowed only slightly as the truck careened onto the highway and accelerated
into the night.

25.

A single headlight
illuminating the road, the truck raced north.
 
After a time, Amber eased off the accelerator and settled at a
comfortable seventy miles per hour.
 
She
glanced down at the dashboard and hunted for the fuel gauge.
 
The needle rested on “E.”

Not much we can do about that now, is there?

Mom knocked on the
rear window, and Justin slid it aside to let her in.

“You okay?”
 
Amber asked as her mother lowered herself
onto the bench seat between her and Justin.

“I’m alive,” she
said.
 
“So I’m better than I thought I’d
be a few minutes ago.
 
Anyway, we have a
problem.
 
Did you see the road outside
the house?
 
Cars.
 
Three of them, parked on the road.”

Justin’s eyebrows
rose.
 
“They can…”

“Yeah,” Mom
said.
 
“They can drive.
 
So we’re being chased.
 
The only way we’re going to make it is to get
off this road.
 
They’re probably all
mounted up by now, and in just a few minutes they’re going to catch up with
us.
 
Find a dirt road, Amber, a side
road, anything.
 
Just get us off this
fast.
”

Amber slowed and
squinted into the darkness, searching for a turnoff.
 

But before she
found one, the motor began sputtering.

Why am I always so goddamned fucked?
 
Heather screamed in her mind.

Because you’re goddamned fucked,
her
mind answered back.

“You’ve got to be
kidding me!” Justin exclaimed in the seat beside her.

“Pull over,”
Heather ordered.
 
“Now, now, right here!”

Amber jerked the
truck to a stop on the shoulder just as the motor sputtered for the final time
and died.
 
She sat there with the steering
wheel in a death grip, staring straight ahead.
 
Invaded, Heather saw, by the dark armies of panic.

Heather reached
across her and cut off the lights.
 
“Come
on,” she said.
 
“We’re bailing out.”

“But…” Amber
began.

“But nothing!
 
They got in that house, they’ll get in this
truck.
 
We need to get away from it NOW!”

She threw the
passenger door open, shoving Justin out into the night.
 
She grabbed Amber and dragged her out after
her, every alarm in her head screeching at the dome light that blazed to life
when she opened the door.
 
It burned like
a little sun, announcing to anything watching them that there were people
here.
 

She slammed the
door shut, cutting the light, and surveyed their surroundings.
 
Above them, the moon illuminated a gray
landscape of fields dotted with outbuildings.
 
Several hundred yards away, dark blobs that could have been barns and a
farmhouse stood in silent menace.
 
She
looked from these to the woods in the distance.

Choose well
, she told herself
.

Her grip tightened
on the Ruger.
 
She dropped the magazine
and turned it sideways in the moonlight.

It was empty.
 
The slide hadn’t locked back, though; she
still had one in the chamber.
 
Just
one.
 

“Where are we
going?”
 
Justin asked.

Heather inhaled
deeply and forced her mind to stop spinning.
 
It wasn’t time for that last bullet, not yet.
 
If they could make those woods, they could
still pull this off.
 
Maybe.

“There,” she
said.
 
“Run!”

Justin’s heart
hammered in his chest.
 
His legs and his
lungs and every other functioning part of his body burned with the effort of
driving his sneakered feet into the ground and hurling himself towards the
woods.
 
He heard the

vampires

cars or trucks or
vans or whatever the hell those things were riding in motoring down the highway
in the rapidly collapsing distance.
 
For
one crazy instant, exuberance exploded in his gut and he thought surely they
would miss the disabled truck on the side of the road and keep going, going,
going.
 
But the buzz of engines and tires
slowed and this moment rapidly fell behind him.

The woods,
he thought,
we’ve got to make the woods.
 
They’ll only follow us so deep into the
woods, because they can’t risk getting lost in a place where there’s nowhere to
hide once the sun comes up.
 
They’ll go a
little ways in, but not much.
 
They won’t
look long.
 
And we’ve got a head start on
them.
 
We can do this.

The perceived
safety of the tree line seemed to remain at a constant distance no matter how
hard he pushed.
 
And then it suddenly
jumped up right in front of him, assaulting his face with branches and twigs
and thorns that grabbed and tore at his clothes.
 
The car sounds had died altogether now, and
as he crashed into the woods on the heels of Heather and Amber he heard
something else, another sound so familiar to him from his life before but now
imbued with life-ending implications: car doors slamming shut.

Scrambling over a
fallen tree, he realized he lost sight of Heather and Amber.
 
He located them again when Heather grabbed
him by the seat of his pants and hauled him to an abrupt stop.

“Down,” she
whispered urgently.
 
“Here, with us!”

“We need to keep
going!” he panted.
 
His skin tingled and
his lungs blazed.
 
“We need to go
deeper!”
 

“They’re
here.
 
They’ll hear us.”

Unable to mount a
coherent resistance, he allowed her to pull him down beside her, behind the
tree.
 
Heather pushed Amber down into a
lying position, doing the same with Justin himself.
 
She rose only long enough to grab a pair of dead
branches still festooned with brown leaves.

“Be quiet,” she
whispered.
 
“It’s a long tree line.
 
There are a lot of woods, and we could have
entered them at any point.
 
It’ll be a
long night, but they don’t have forever.
 
We can live in the sun; they can’t.”

His throat seemed
to be closing its hands around his vocal cords and restricting speech.
 
Whether it owed this effect to physical
exhaustion or some evolutionary mechanism designed to make him shut up in the
presence of sabertooth tigers, he didn’t know.
 
Sticks and twigs dug into his side.
 
The earthy aroma of the forest rose up from the bed of leaves on which
he lay.

Door slamming
again, engines starting.
 
They’re going away
, he thought with
giddy optimism.
 
They’re moving on, giving up, going home!
 
They don’t know where we are so they’re just
quitting!
 
We’ve made it!

But then he heard
the bumps and the creaks.
 
The ups and
downs of vehicles moving across a rough surface, and he realized that the
vampires were driving towards the woods.