The Last Days of October (9 page)

12.

The power failure
plunged the cell into the deepest darkness Justin had ever known.
 
Ten seconds later the generators kicked on
and the overheads once more bathed the floors and walls with their sickly glow.

Down the corridor,
somebody screamed.

Blown transformer
, he thought.
 
He didn’t even sit up.
 
He remained on his bunk, facing the wall,
until he heard a noise at the bars behind him.
 
At this point, he rolled over and looked.

He froze.

The man standing
at the bars was a jailer.
 
He looked
vaguely familiar; Justin thought he might have seen him sitting at the monitors
there in the control room, but he couldn’t tell for sure, not now.
 
His face was a hideous white beneath the
wisps of his military regulation haircut.
 
Blood soaked into his uniform shirt from a wound in his neck.
 

What what what the FUCK is that

The eyes—solid
black from corner to corner—pulled the life from Justin’s body like a medieval
executioner drawing a prisoner’s bowels.
 
He had to blink to keep himself from flying off the edge of
madness.
 

It smiled and
parted its white lips to reveal a set of fangs.

Now Justin sat
up.
 
His breath caught in his chest.
 
He couldn’t even scream.

The jailer seemed
to like that.
 
He shook the bars, making
them rattle in their tracks and click against the magnetic lock as a ring of
keys jangled on his utility belt.
 
Justin’s gaze darted to the keys, then back to that horrid face.
 
His paralysis broke and he scooted backwards
on his tiny bunk, back striking the wall.

All that thing has to do is open the bars
and come in.
 
Close the doors and take
its sweet time.

It opened its
mouth again.
 
“Let me in,” it commanded
in a guttural voice, lips barely moving.

He opened his own
mouth to speak, but a desert in his throat wouldn’t let him.
 
His head spun.

If that’s a vampire, it needs your
permission to come in.

He summoned enough
strength to croak, “No.”

The vampire turned
his eyes towards the ceiling and roared with frustration.
 
Justin pressed himself against the wall.
 
If he could have, he’d have made himself part
of it.
 
So when that thing got hungry
enough to come in without permission, it couldn’t get him.

Screams down the
corridor again.
 
Apparently perceiving
more action elsewhere, it growled at him and lumbered off in the direction of
the in-processing office.
 
Justin
swallowed, blinked and tried to remember to keep breathing.

What, what, what the fuck, what, what, what
the fuck

The question
repeated itself in his mind without punctuating, an insane little ditty that
ran over and over.
 
He reached through
his jail-issue jumpsuit, grabbed a piece of flesh on his outer thigh and
pinched.
 
The pain anchored him.
 
He needed that, an anchor.
 
If he lost his shit here, he was a dead man.

And that would be bad, because right now
you’re a living man stuck in a jail cell and apparently the people in charge
around here have gone vampire.
 
Think
they’ll feed you at chow time?

Panic opened a
great hole beneath him.
 
Considering the
possibility of starving to death or dying of thirst, he nearly fell right
through it.
 
He pinched harder.

Stop.

It stopped.
 
The panic receded.
 
He released his skin, savoring the dull ache
where his thumb and forefinger had pressed together.
 
He would not starve to death and he would not
die of thirst.
 
He would not do these
things because the United States was a big country, North Carolina was a big
state and at some point, somebody would realize some really bad shit had gone
down at the Morgan County Law Enforcement Center.
 
Probably very soon, as in tomorrow
morning.
 
When none of the inmates showed
up for court and somebody went to check on them.

Thinking ahead, he
stood and ripped a sleeve from his striped shirt.
 
He jammed it in the drain of the sink and ran
the water until the sink was nearly overflowing.
 
There.
 
Just in case the water lines lost pressure, now he had a water
reserve.
 
He could refill it as long as
the lines held.
 
He had resolved his
water problem, at least temporarily.
 
He
was taking charge of his fate, taking charge of this situation.

There.
 
Now you can die of starvation instead of thirst.

He drank the water
and ran the faucet to replace it, studying the flow for any signs of
weakening.
 
Seeing none, he returned to
his bunk and sat with his back resting against the wall.
 
He stared at the bars and let his mind roll.

Back in high
school, his American Literature teacher had told a story about the exhumation
of a 19
^th
-century graveyard she had seen as a college student up at
William and Mary.
 
They were putting a
mall in or something, and the developer had agreed to move the graveyard to a
final resting place with less value on the commercial real estate market.
 
For whatever reason, she wanted to go watch.

Some of these coffins were over two hundred
years old,
she said.
 
So when the workers raised them, a lot of
them broke.
 
The bodies were just rags
and bones at that point, but the thing was, some of those coffins had claw
marks on the insides of the lids.
 
Because the people hadn’t been dead, not all the way.

He remembered the
shiver that had passed through his body.
 
People passing out and waking up in a wooden box beneath the earth,
pitch black dark, beating on the lids of their coffins, screaming, clawing at
the wood.
 
Not knowing that a hundred and
forty years would pass before anyone would come get them.
 
Screaming, shrieking, crying until they ran
out of oxygen.

Or not.
 
Maybe air filtered down through the loose soil.
 
Maybe they lived down there until they died
of thirst.
 
Takes a few days.

Justin stared at
the washbasin.
 
His fabric drain plug
wasn’t working; the water level was falling.
 
In just a few minutes, it had dropped at least an inch.

“HELP!” he
screamed.
 
“GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

And, as if God
himself had heard Justin screaming, the locks buzzed and the door popped open.

The vampire jailer
crossed his mind, but images of claw marks on ancient coffin lids rolled in and
squished such tactical concerns.
 
He
wasted no time in leaping from his bunk and breaking out into the corridor.
 
Up ahead towards the control room, past the
empty holding cells to his right, he saw Petey Starnes.

Petey staggered,
his immense gut rising and falling with the labor of his breath.
 
He wore blue latex gloves, like he’d been
performing a body cavity search when everything erupted.
 
Blood covered the front of his khaki uniform
shirt.
 
Behind him, boot-clad feet stuck
out from behind the wall.
 
A body or
bodies, lying on the floor.

Justin retreated
until his back struck the wall.
 
To his
left, another wall; to his right, the open door to his cell.
 
All he had to do was step back inside and
close the bars.
 
Maybe they’d find his
claw marks on the wall someday.

“Petey?” he called
out in a strangled voice.
 
“You all
right, man?”

Petey stopped and
leaned against the wall for support.
 
“Good to go, man.
 
Little winded.”

“What’s with the
blood?
 
You ain’t gonna bite me, right?”

“Chill out.
 
I stabbed one of these fuckers.
 
Stabbed a couple of them, actually.”

Justin moved
slowly along the wall to where Petey stood.
 
Around the corner, the corridor opened up into a little lobby.
 
One wall consisted of the glass-fronted
control room, while another sported three in-processing offices and the
countertop where Justin had laid his belongings and clothes upon arrival.
 
The elevator was located just to the right of
the corridor and to the right of that, the door to the real lobby.
 
With a door to the outside.

Three bodies lay
on the floor, two in Sheriff’s Department brown, the last in civilian
clothes.
 
Justin recognized him as the
vomiting man from earlier.

“That bastard,”
Petey said, “was a blood-sucking vampire.
 
He fuckin’ bit Jimmy.
 
Ray broke a
broom in half and stabbed him, but then old Ray and Jimmy got into it because
Jimmy started getting bitey, and then I had to stab both of them because they both
got bitey.
 
Right through the heart,
man.
 
Like in a goddamned movie.”

A broom handle
protruded from the chest of each deputy.
 
Justin blinked at them, trying to wrap his mind around this scene that
Petey described like it made perfect sense.

“You get bit?”

“Naw, man.”

“Not even a
little?
 
What’s with the huffing and
puffing?”

“I’m fat and out
of shape.
 
That’s what fat people do when
they exert themselves.
 
We huff and
puff.”
 
Petey leaned over and sucked in a
great chestful of air.
 
He stood up and let
it go in one long breath.
 
“Damn!”

“How…I mean…”

“Shit, I don’t
know,” Petey said.
 
“That dude right
there was all sick and suddenly he came up with fangs.
 
Where’d he get them?
 
I have no earthly idea.”

Justin stared at
the bodies.
 
A few hours ago, he had been
sitting in his apartment.
 
Watching
cable, eating potato chips.
 
“What do we
do now?” he asked.

“We get out of
here, that’s what we do now.
 
Your
clothes are still in the bag in that office back there—go put them on and let’s
bounce.”

Justin did.
 
Jeans, socks, sneakers, tee shirt,
hoodie.
 
Despite his present
circumstances, he felt immeasurably better when he rid himself of the jail
garb.
 
Getting rid of that felt like
shedding a rough, raspy, second skin in which terrible things could happen to him.
 
He didn’t feel like himself again, but he
felt better.

Back in the
in-processing lobby, Petey leaned against the frame in the doorway to the
control room.
 
He’d been leaning over
again, but he straightened up when Justin approached.
 

“Sure you’re okay?”

“Listen,” he said,
ignoring the question.
 
“This whole
motherfucker is a lockdown facility.
 
None of these doors is going to open without somebody buzzing it open,
and when the finger comes off the buzzer those locks are going to engage
again.
 
So what we’re going to do is, I’m
going to buzz them and you jam them open as you go through.
 
We’ll get in my truck and haul ass.”

“Gotcha.”
 
Justin went and stood by the door that led
out to the little waiting room outside the in-processing lobby.
 
But then he stopped.

Claw marks.

He thought of the
rest of the building rising above him.
 
Two, three floors of deputies and inmates, some as innocent as he—some
even more so.
 
Some cell blocks and bunk
rooms hadn’t been opened tonight.
 
There
were men up there, trapped behind locked doors as he himself had been trapped
behind the bars of the holding cell.
 
If
someone didn’t come neutralize this situation in two or three days, they would
all die.
 
Like colonists buried alive in
the days before coroners, medical examiners and such simple yet critically
important things as establishing death before sticking someone in a pine box.

“What about
everybody else?”
 
He asked.

Petey, who had
moved behind the glass in the control room, scowled and stuck his head
out.
 
“What about them?”

“Are we going to
leave everybody in here?
 
What about your
fellow deputies?
 
What about the people
in the cells?
 
We can’t just abandon them.”

“Come in here for
a second.”

Petey motioned him
into the control room.
 
Justin found
himself standing before a bank of black-and-white television monitors.