The Last Days of October

1.

He did it.

Heather Palmer
unzipped the tent.
 
Cocooned in her
sleeping bag, Amber stirred but did not wake, settling easily back into the
kind of sleep enjoyed only by exhausted teenagers.
 
Heather froze until the girl resumed the rhythmic
breathing of slumber.
 
Only when she felt
confident that her popping joints wouldn’t wake her daughter did she continue
into the night.

Although daytime
temperatures had lingered in the sixties all week, by night the forest grew
chilly.
 
Hands shoved in the pockets of
her coat, Heather shuffled over and lowered herself into one of the two chairs
stationed beside the remains of the night’s fire.
 
They had cleared the space earlier but
already a blanket of dead foliage covered the campsite.
 
Leaves sprinkled down around her with each
sigh of the weakening autumn as it wound through stands of black oak and white
ash, red maple and yellowwood.

He said he’d do it and this time he did.

No,
she told herself.
 
He
didn’t.

Despite the
coat’s protection, she shivered.
 
She
should have taken his pistol, she realized, and then she wouldn’t even have to
think these things.
 
She should have
thrown it in the truck with the rest of the camping gear.
 
Mike was a lot safer with that thing out of
the house.
 
He still could have slashed
his wrists or hung himself, but that would have
hurt
and after all his bluster, Mike was a big baby.
 
He required 24-hour skilled nursing care when
he came down with the flu.
 
Guys like
that couldn’t hang themselves.

But they
could
blow their heads off.
 
This worried Heather a great deal, because
things were different now.
 
Not just the
move from Norfolk
to Deep Creek—she’d moved with him, and moved farther, before this.
 
And not just Amber turning eighteen,
either.
 
Now…

Now I don’t need him anymore.

Right.
 
The one good thing about turning forty—the
solitary shimmer of light and hope and optimism there among the collapse of her
chest and ass, the expansion of her midsection and the early-stage
leatherization of her skin—was that her grandmother’s trust paid out.
 
And while it hadn’t made her a millionaire,
it
did
provide sustainable
freedom.
 
It meant she could buy a house,
go to school and keep it all going for a few years while she figured out what
to do with the rest of her life.
 
A life
which, if she so chose, didn’t have to include Mike.
 

The balance of
power had shifted.
 
And he knew
that.
 
So all bets were off.

A branch snapped
in the distance and splashed into the leaves covering the forest floor.
 
Heather jerked with a jolt of adrenaline.
 
Her head snapped up and she scanned the woods
for any sign of movement.
 
She would have
liked to have Mike’s pistol for another reason; she and Amber were all alone,
miles from the nearest police station, farther still from the nearest
hospital.
 
While she had enjoyed this
one-on-one time with Amber, she had remained conscious of their position the
entire time: two women alone in the woods, unarmed.

Tomorrow,
she thought.

Things would be
better when they got back home. And not just the toilets and showers and
electricity; Mike would have cooled off, calmed down.
 
They could talk about things, maybe with the
assistance of a counselor this time.
 
And
while the balance of power tilted now a little more in her favor, that didn’t
necessarily mean the end.
 
Even if she
had told him to get the hell out.
 
Honestly, they probably needed this—a big fight where everybody spoke
their minds—in order to move forward.
 
Together.

And maybe she’d
find his body sprawled on the floor in their bedroom.

The wind blew then,
disturbing the ground covering of dead leaves and rattling the survivors still
clinging to half-naked branches.
 
It
spoke of the winter to come, a cold and cruel season of death and reduction
that culled the weak from every species.
 
North Carolina
winters could be short and mild, but they killed anyway.
 
Cold air from Canada swooped in like an invading
army with days that besieged the psyche until it understood that summer, spring
and autumn were dreams.
 
Until it
confessed that this—mornings of frozen breath and stinging skin, trees raising
their barren branches in silent surrender to the gray skies that pelted them
with freezing rain, overwhelming sadness at the eventual death of the preceding
year and the stillbirth of the next—was reality.

Because leaves
always fell.
 
Eventually, everything
died.

“Are you still
there?”
 
she whispered.
 
“Or did you do it?
 
Did you show me this time?”

The dead foliage
gave no answer.
 
Feeling more alone than
ever, she allowed herself to cry quietly, but only for a short while.
 
When she felt her legs capable of supporting
her weight, she rose from the chair and retreated into the tent.

Tomorrow,
she told herself.
 
Everything
will feel better tomorrow.
 
Everything’s
going to be okay.

2.

This is how he makes you put up with this
shit again and again.
 
He preys on your
concern.

In the single
southbound lane of Highway 49, Heather gripped the steering wheel and willed
her lips still.
 
She did that
sometimes—moving her lips when she talked to herself, whispering the lines of
whatever internal monologue had seized her brain at that particular
moment.
 
Unlike smoking, which she’d
given up the moment she discovered she was pregnant with Amber, she couldn’t
kick this particular habit.
 
No matter
how hard she tried.

“What are you talking
to yourself about?”

Amber’s voice
startled her so much that she nearly launched herself into the sagging
headliner of her old Dodge Durango.
 
Immediately, her face reddened.

“Nothing.”

Laughing with
Amber as they packed the Durango
that morning, she had remembered how she’d been thinking the night before and
felt silly.
 
Of course he’s not dead
, she chided herself.
 
You
halfwit.
 
A person’s fears added up
much higher in the depths of the night, especially a cold night in the
woods.
 
Reality had a tendency to bend in
the dark; a person’s understanding of the possible and impossible fluctuated
with the condition of her environment.
 
And just a few days before Halloween, at that.
 
Fertile ground for the growth of an
overactive imagination.
 

Lions and tigers and bears and husbands
committing suicide, oh my!

Right.
 
There was no Wizard of Oz, and Heather was
too chubby and old to be Dorothy.
 
Mike
would be there when she got home.
 
Lying
on the couch, probably watching ESPN or sleeping.
 
He would have repaired the hole in the wall,
but he would have left a pile of dirty dishes in the sink because everything
would be normal again and things couldn’t be normal again if Mike didn’t leave
her some dishes.
 
Maybe Clyde,
the old loser he’d met down at the American Legion, would be passed out on the
floor.
 
She could kick him in the
ribs.
 
He could ogle her backside on the
way out.

Normal.

“You have a
signal?”
 
she asked.

Amber looked down
at her mobile phone and unlocked the screen.
 
“Nope.”

“Try mine.”

She did.
 
“Yours is dead, too.”

“Nice,” she
muttered.

She willed the
Mike-thoughts away by concentrating on her surroundings.
 
Highway 49’s two lanes wound like a fat black
snake past the churned-up remains of the corn and tobacco harvest, the wire-enclosed
cow and horse pastures.
 
The occasional
white frame house supervised collections of corrugated tin outbuildings
standing beneath a cloudless sky.
 
Ancient curing sheds and barns listed to the left and right in various
states of disrepair.
 
In those spots
where three centuries of settlement had yet to claim nature for itself, leaves
on great trees blazed with the vivid colors of autumn, golds and yellows,
bronzes and browns, coppers and reds so rich it struck her as impossible that
they could ever fall.

“I don’t want you
to use the money for me,” Amber said.

Heather
blinked.
 
“What?”

“Grandma’s
money.
 
I don’t want it.
 
I can take loans for school, and I have my
whole life to work.
 
You guys are old.
 
Use it for yourselves.
 
That’s what you were fighting about,
right?
 
The money?”

Heather looked
over at her.
 
The girl sat with her hands
folded around her smartphone, her head resting against the passenger
window.
 
She looked back at Heather with
a pair of deep brown eyes set in a face that Heather’s own genes could not
explain.
 
Very little of Heather had
translated into Amber’s appearance; whereas Heather’s face was broad and plain,
Amber enjoyed the delicate bone structure of a model or a particularly
beautiful movie star.
 
Amber was slender
where Heather was thick, curvy where she was straight.
 
Only her coloration—brown eyes, brown hair,
pale skin—and a slight roundness of the face suggested a familial relation.

“We fight about a
lot of things,” Heather said.
 
“But using
the money for you isn’t one of them.”

“Bull.
 
I heard you guys.”

“What?”

“The whole
neighborhood heard you.”
 
Amber rolled
her eyes and collapsed even further into her seat.
 
“Okay, so he wants a new truck.
 
Get him the truck, it’s no big deal.
 
I can take loans.
 
Seriously, Mom, I don’t care.
 
Just get him a truck, tell him to shut up and
you guys can use the rest to go on vacation or something.”

“Do you have any
idea how much a four-year college actually costs?”

“A lot.
 
But
I
don’t care.
 
It’s me, it’s my life,
I’ll take care of it.
 
You want to buy me
something?
 
Pull into this gas station
right here and get me a Diet Coke.”

Up ahead, a red
and yellow Shell sign announced the presence of the gas station and convenience
store where they’d stopped to buy the raw material for s’mores on their way
out.
 
Heather lifted her foot from the
accelerator and transferred it to the brake pedal.
 
The Durango
rolled to a stop at the nearest set of pumps.
 
Heather withdrew a five dollar bill from her purse and handed it to
Amber.
 
“Get me one, too,” she said.
 
“And some gum.”

“Got it.
 
Can we listen to something other than old
people music the rest of the way?”

“Sure.”

Amber smiled at
her as she turned and started towards the store.
 
Heather sighed before reaching forward and
turning off the Police CD that had played ever since they left this
morning.
 
Her
old people
music.
 
Shaking
her head, she pressed the first stereo preset button to tune in the Top 40
station Amber liked so much.
 
Hearing
only dead air, she switched to the next station in the lineup, then the next,
then the next.
 

All dead.

“Mom?”

She looked
up.
 
Amber approached the truck, arms
folded tightly across her chest.
 
The
pinched mask of worry that had replaced her face chased away Heather’s concerns
over another of her truck’s manifold electrical problems.

“Something’s wrong
in there,” Amber said.
 
“I think you need
to see it.”

Despite the
gathering of cars outside, the store was deserted.
 
A candy display lay overturned on the dirty
floor, chocolate bars and fruit chews and bubble gum splattered about the point
of impact like the guts of a giant piñata.
 
A magazine rack stood partially ripped away from the register
counter.
 
Several feet away, a junta of
mummified hot dogs witnessed everything from a motionless rotisserie.

She pushed several
issues of
Sports Illustrated
and
Maxim
out of her way with her leading
foot as she stepped inside.
 
“Hey!”
 
she called.
 
“Anybody here?”

“There’s nobody,”
Amber said behind her.

Heather listened,
hoping for a voice from the stockroom, but she heard only her own pulse.
 
Warning lights blazed in her head, but these
failed to disturb the silence.
 
No
background music, no shuffling feet, no humming drink coolers.
 
Just her pulse, quickening now, and her
breath rising to match it.

She tiptoed around
the cash register—it seemed appropriate somehow to stay quiet—and checked the
aisles.
 
Nothing.
 
On the other side of the store, the drink
coolers held mute crowds of sodas, beer and cheap wines.
 
Her eyes slid across to the milk shelf, where
four columns of plastic jugs stretched into the darkness behind them.
 
Sickly white curds floated atop a yellowish
liquid inside each one.
 
The power had
evidently gone out long ago.

Why is it out?
 
And why haven’t they cut it back on?

She felt like she
had stumbled onto a movie set.
 
She could
almost hear the director with his bullhorn.
 
Okay, you’re going to poke around
in the store for a while, then run outside and scream your head off while the
camera zooms out and the audience suddenly learns this whole episode took place
inside a snow globe.

She could handle
the screaming part just fine.
 
Oh,
yeah.
 
She’d win a freaking Oscar.

On the counter by
the cash register, amidst scattered tins of chewing tobacco and little bottles
of Ginseng X-treme Energy Booster (For Drivers On The GO!), lay the receiver of
a land-line telephone.
 
She stepped
behind the register, picked it up, and pushed several buttons on the dialer
mounted beneath the counter.
 
She had so
expected it to be dead that she barely blinked when it gave no dial tone.

Amber watched,
lips pursed.

Heather set down
the phone and looked around her feet.
 
Whatever commotion had occurred in front of the counter had also
occurred behind it.
 
A plastic basket of
pens, rubber bands and matchbooks had overturned and lay scattered about the
floor of the raised cashier’s platform next to a display of Halloween candy,
also overturned.
 
Rolls of pricing
stickers and receipt paper had fallen off the shelves beneath the counter and
joined the other sundries in the mess.
 
She pivoted to survey the rest of the store from this higher vantage
point and her foot struck something hard and heavy that scraped on the dirty
industrial tile.

A sawed-off
shotgun.

It was a double
barrel, broken open in the middle of what Heather’s gut told her was an attempt
to reload.
 
Long-buried training she had
received as a Navy military policewoman twenty years ago helped her resist the
urge to pick it up and examine it more closely.
 
She knelt beside the shotgun and bent until she could see the brass
heads of the shell casings.

Firing pin strikes
on the primers.
 
Someone had used it.

“What
happened?”
 
Amber asked.

“Nothing good.”

She laid the gun
on the counter without closing it.
 
Right
in front of her, a display of Frito-Lay products stood undisturbed by the two
loads of buckshot that the clerk had apparently emptied into somebody who had
subsequently made it out of here without leaving his innards all over the
floor.

Heather raised her
eyes and looked at the scene beyond the plate glass window covering the
storefront.
 
In front of her Durango, a late model
Chevrolet Suburban sat waiting for its owner.
 
A Ford pickup truck with one flat tire and a faded For Sale sign in the
windshield rested in one of the parking spaces slotted along the front of the
convenience store, with two other vehicles that probably belonged to other
customers parked in the others.
 
There
should have been a half-dozen people in here, counting the clerk.
 

“This is weird,”
Amber said.

“Yeah,” Heather
replied.
 
Her voice came out a register
higher than normal thanks to the muscles in her chest, which had begun to
tighten like the ones in her shoulders.
 
“Where do you think the owners of those cars went?”

“Color me
clueless.
 
Maybe it’s the rapture.
 
We should have gone to church more.”

Heather took a
deep breath and scanned the store.
 
Her
eyes lit upon a pair of doors set into the wall beside the drink coolers.
 
A sign centered over the top of the frames
proclaimed these as RESTROOMS.
 

“I’m going to check
the bathrooms.”

She stepped down
from the register platform and approached the doors.
 
She stood before the one marked WOMEN for a
moment, then retreated back into an aisle and returned with a roll of paper
towels.
 
She tore open the plastic,
ripped off several sheets and wrapped them around the doorknob.
 
But before she could twist it, her hand
stopped on its own.

Something on the
other side of the door moved.

She pulled back,
blinking and staring at the door.
 
The sun
streaming through the plate glass warmed her neck almost to the burning
point.
 
She stopped breathing as her ears
pricked for a repetition of that sound.