The Last Days of October (7 page)

She wondered if
vampires slept during the day.

“What
happened?
 
How is any of this even
possible?” she asked, turning back around.
 

Stepping out of
the doorway, Clyde walked over to a stack of bagged insecticide granules and
sat down.
 
He shrugged.
 
“I have no idea,” he said.
 
“These bitches just…took over.
 
I don’t know where they came from; it’s like
a fuckin’ plague or something.
 
The rage
of Jesus H. Christ.
 
First night, we lose
power, internet, phones.
 
We also lose
about three quarters of the population.
 
Twenty thousand people, gone like
that.
”

He snapped his
fingers.

“Next morning, I
sober up and wake up on my floor.
 
It
takes me until about two in the afternoon to wander outside to find out exactly
what the goddamn fuck is going on with all my utilities.
 
None of my neighbors are home, and I mean,
like,
none.
 
I try driving over to your place to look for
Mike and he’s not there, either.
 
So I
just cruise around.
 

“About two thirty,
I come down here to see if anyone knows anything.
 
There’s a crew of guys boarding up the jail,
and I say hey, what’s going on, and they say, somebody in there got bit and now
they’ve all gone over.
 
I ask, bit by
what?
 
Gone over
where
?
 
They tell me to
either get a hammer and help or shut the fuck up and go on because they have to
get this done before the sun goes down.
 
I’ve never really been one for hammers and nails, so I shut the fuck up
and go on.
 
Go around to the front of the
courthouse and I see them doing
that.
”

He jabbed his
finger at the storefront, at the bodies hanging across the street.

Heather breathed
through her nose.
 
Her stomach
crawled.
 
“Who are they?”

“Them?
 
Queers.
 
The ones they could find, anyway.”

Heather’s skin
tingled.
 
“Who’s ‘they?’”

“Everybody who
made it through the first night.”

“Everybody?”

His homely face
was somber, expressionless.
 
He shrugged,
as if the answer was of no consequence.
 
“Shit, I don’t know if it was literally everybody, but it was a lot of
fuckers out there.
 
They were like, this is
the Lord’s doing.
 
Pretty damn convinced
of it, too.”

Heather thought of
her grandmother’s Bible, open to Isaiah.
 
Mike had been reading it.

Clyde laughed
then, actually laughed, like he’d made a funny joke.
 
What’d
the man say when the horse walked into the bar?
 
Hey, you see those queers get lynched in front of the courthouse?
 
Hee hee hee.
 
“Ain’t that some shit?
 
You got vampires running all over, getting
into people’s houses and biting this and biting that and these folks say hey,
this looks like the work of that God we’ve been worshipping.
 
But who knows, right??
 
Maybe they were on to something.”

“You can’t be
serious.”

“Serious as a
motherfuckin’, cock-suckin’ heart attack.
 
This is some
shit
, Heather,
this is some crazy-ass fucked-up
shit
.
 
I mean, have you seen what’s happened to
people?
 
Have you seen one of
them
?”

Pain in her belly,
her throat.
 
Pain all over.

Mike.

“I have,” she said
softly.

“Then can you
understand why some people might think hey, this is biblical.
 
Must be the vengeance of the Lord.
 
And why not?
 
Why wouldn’t He be pissed off?
 
We’ve been running all over killing people, torturing people, robbing
people.
 
All of us, every damn one of us
is in on it.
 
And morality?
 
Shit.
 
No such thing anymore.
 
Men not
only lying with men, but men
marrying
men and the government blessing it!
 
I
mean, what the fuck?”

He shook his head,
which rotated on the spindle of his neck.

“So maybe they
were right.
 
Maybe God said like Janet
Jackson, maybe God said, what have you done for
me
lately?
 
Jack shit, that’s
what.
 
And maybe He got sick of
that.
 
Maybe He said fuck
this
bullshit, we’re going back to the
basics.
 
We’re writing us a new chapter
in the Bible, because obviously these assholes forgot a few things.
 
Maybe He did.

“But look, I
didn’t have
shit
to do with that out
there.
 
I came down the street, I heard
them yelling, I saw this shit going down and I got out of there A.S.A.P.
 
I’m a single man living alone.
 
For all I knew, they’d get it in their heads
that
I’m
one of these queers and string
me up, too.”

The day just
beyond the plate glass window lit him from behind.
 
Shadows covered his narrow face, making it
difficult to read his expressions.
 
His
head seemed to have sunken even lower between his narrow shoulders.
 
His long arms dangled idly at his sides.
 
He had never looked more like a mantis.

Please tell me this is not the last man on
Earth
, she thought.

He looked back
over his shoulder at the bodies hanging across the street and coughed.
 
He reached into his pocket and removed a handkerchief
into which he hawked something she was glad she couldn’t see.

“Anyway,” he said,
“what brings you down this way?
 
Surely
you’re not planning on re-seeding your lawn or doing a tile backsplash at a
time like this?”

“Camping
supplies,” she said.
 
She turned and
looked into the dark heart of the store.
 
She wondered if she’d have to go back there, or if she could talk Clyde
into doing it.
 
“We’re going to make a
run to Fayetteville, see if the army’s got
anything set up at Fort
Bragg.”

“Who’s with you?”
he asked.
 
“Are you alone?”

“No, I’ve got
Amber.”

“You guys haven’t
found anybody else?
 
It’s just you?”

“Just us,” she
confirmed.
 
It was dark back there, too
dark, but she could still see the racks on the wall at the very rear of the
store.
 
Off to one side, the door to the
stockroom stood closed, motionless.
 
If
she got too close to that door and there was something hiding in there…

Suddenly, a
different thought pierced her skull.

Ask him how he knew they were gay if he
wasn’t part of the mob.

She froze.

“Heather?” he
asked.

She reached for
the Ruger as she turned, but she found that he’d moved right up behind
her.
 
And before she could ask, say or do
anything, his closed fist smashed into her face and made speech impossible.

9.

She couldn’t have been
out long.
 
She awoke moments later on her
face, draped over the stinking bags of insecticide at the front of the hardware
store.
 
Someone was unbuttoning her
jeans.
 
Unzipping them, jerking them
down.

Clyde.

“Oh, yeah,” he
said, panting.
 
“Gonna fuck you both, you
and her.
 
All day and all night.”

Hands invaded her
underwear, fondled and squeezed her buttocks.
 
The side of her face a numb slab of meat, her head swam as she tried to
piece together what had just happened, what was happening now.
 
She blinked, trying to clear her vision.
 
In the upper corner of the store, a security
camera stared at her with a sightless eye.
 

Her Ruger lay on
the floor beside another stack of bags.
 
Out of reach.

“You’re mine
now.
 
Both of you.”

His profane
fingers closed into fists and he jerked her underwear down to mid-thigh, with
her jeans.
 
It had felt warm in the
hardware store there in the sun coming through the window, but now the air was
cold against her bare skin.
 
The hands
kneaded and fondled her backside for a moment and then pulled away.

She heard a
zipper.

No
.
 
No, this is not happening
.

But it
was
happening, it
was.
 
She had come downtown
to get beef jerky and batteries and now she was getting raped on top of a
gardening display.

No.
 
No
.
 

“Gotta warn you,”
he gasped behind her.
 
“I’m not gentle.”

Those rude bony
hands reached between her thighs in search of something that was not
theirs.
 
When his skin touched hers, an
electric shock suddenly coursed through her body and she jerked to life.
 
In a single motion, she whirled around and
drove her elbow into his face.

His nose exploded
in a shower of blood and he fell back.
 
He fell on his butt, his erect penis pointing at the ceiling like some
sorry little twig, his eyes open wide in surprise.
 
Something moved in the shadows behind him,
but Heather paid it no mind.
 
She fell
sideways.
 
Her legs mermaid-useless
within the bindings of her jeans and underwear, she scooted along the floor
until her right hand closed around the Ruger’s grip.
 
She brought it to bear just as Clyde
struggled to his feet.
 

“YOU BITCH!” he
screamed.

She leveled the
gun at him, his face in her sights.
 
“Don’t move,” she said.

“My fugging
NOSE!”
 
Blood poured from his face and
splattered his shirt.
 
He sounded like he
had a cold.
 

She was barely
aware of the floor beneath her naked bottom.
 
“Move and you die.”

He looked down at
her, blinking.
 

And then he
smiled.

Suddenly conscious
that she was laying on the ground with her private parts exposed, a small part
of her wanted nothing more than to cover up so that Clyde—so that no one—could
see.
 
But the rest of her held the Ruger
steady.

“You can’t shoot
me,” he said.
 
“I’m the last man on
Earth.
 
There’s no one else.”

“Don’t move,” she
repeated through clenched teeth.

“Put that gun
down.”

“Clyde…”

“Come on,” he
said.
 
“We’ve
got
to do this.
 
It’s the way
of things.
 
Adam and Eve, right?”

He took a step
forward.

Heather squeezed
the trigger.

A flash and peal
of thunder, and a neat round hole appeared on Clyde’s left cheek a split-second
before the back of his head disappeared.
 
Something dark and red splattered on the ceiling tile.

He fell
backwards.
 
This time, he didn’t get up.

She held the gun
on him for several moments.
 
When he
didn’t move, she stood and laid it atop the bags of fertilizer while she pulled
up her underwear and jeans.

Something moved at
the back of the store.
 
She snatched the
pistol and aimed it towards the shadows, barely visible in the back.
 
Three of them—one tall, two short.
 
She couldn’t see their faces, but something
inside of her head told her she was looking at Jack Walker, the proprietor of
Revolution Hardware.
 
And his children;
she had seen them in here working alongside their father when she came to buy
supplies before.
 
They had come here
after turning, or they’d been here when it all happened.
 
And they remained here because…

The storeroom.
 
The storeroom has no windows, and it’s
dark.
 
They like that.

They didn’t
move.
 
She glanced down at Clyde, lying there in a pool of slowly-spreading blood in
that space where the sunlight began weakening and giving way to the darkness
beyond.
 
She recalled that time Mike had
hit a deer with his truck on base up in Norfolk.
 
The military policeman had asked him if he
wanted to keep it.
 
Mike had declined.

They want him.

“He’s all yours,”
Heather announced.
 
The Walkers, shrouded
in darkness, didn’t move.
 
It took her an
instant to understand that they hadn’t been waiting for her permission; the light
was simply too strong up at the front of the store, even where Clyde lay.

But it wouldn’t
remain that way indefinitely.
 
As the day
dragged on, the shadows here would lengthen, creep forward.

And when they did
that, the Walkers would claim Clyde.
 

She hurried out of
the store.