The Last Days of October (14 page)

17.

“You don’t know
what deer corn is?”

In one of her
halting attempts to get to know people in Deep Creek, she had asked the guy who
sat beside her in Introductory Psychology, a stocky boy who wore a Tim McGraw
concert T-shirt and a Realtree camouflage cap, what he’d done over the weekend.
 
He had worked all the time, he said, then
took a little bit of Sunday afternoon to throw down deer corn.
 

She said she
didn’t know what deer corn was, or why anyone would throw it.

The boy—man, she
supposed, they were all adults here now and this one wore a wedding
ring—chuckled.
 
“It’s for hunting,” he
said.
 
“You pick a place, then you get
you a big old bag of corn.
 
Crappy corn,
like pig feed.
 
Pour a little pile of the
stuff, then come back every so often and pour it again.
 
Deer like this stuff, so they get used to
coming to the same spot to eat it.
 
Then
you get up in your deer stand and wait.
 
Eventually, one of them deer’s going to come around and you can pop him.”

“Like a trap,” she
said.

“Exactly.
 
Deer have to eat.
 
And they’ll go wherever they can get chow the
easiest.”

She stood now
frozen in a darkness as impenetrable as if the Devil had plucked out her
eyes.
 
Panic rose in her throat, borne on
a wave of bile that stank and burned.
 
Her head swam from the sudden jolt of adrenaline, but she couldn’t move.

A storeroom door
squealed on its hinges and feet shuffled across the floor.
 
Blind fear overtook her and her mind began
turning as dark as her vision.

“Amber!”
 
Mom, invisible.
 
Behind her.
 
The sound of that voice climbing the rungs of fear did something to her
and she jolted, sucking in a chestful of air.
 
She felt around in her cart until her hands closed on a triple pack of
cigarette lighters.
 
She tore open the
pack, navigating by feel.
 
One fell
clattering back into the cart, but she retained the others and stuffed one in
her pocket.
 
She lit the other one.
 
Instantly, a tiny oasis of orange light
pushed back the dark.
 

Her mother stood
beside the cart, looking like a vampire herself in the unnatural shadows.
 
She held the pistol, that useless pistol that
would not help them.
 
“Justin!”

“It’s a trap!” he
yelled.
 
“Run!”

Amber
blinked.
 
On the shelf beside her, rows
of wasp spray, roach trays and other household pest control items stood at the
ready for purchasers who would never come.
 
Amber grabbed a can of Raid.
 
She
flicked off the protective plastic lid that covered the spray button.

Close by, feet
shuffled along the floor.
 
Dairy aisle,
the cases lining the back wall of the grocery section.
 
Damn things were flanking them.
 
Stabbing in from both ends of the aisle, like
pincers.
 

Mom pulled her
backwards, as if to retreat in the direction they’d come, but she jerked
forward.
 
“No!” she hissed.
 
“This way!”

Abandoning the
cart and everything in it, they moved around the endcap in the direction of the
nauseating stench of rotten meat.
 
She
heard a shuffling, a crackling and a crinkling.
 
She looked up.

One, two, three of
them crouched atop the shelf of bleach and toilet bowl cleaners.
 
Normal people would have collapsed it, but
these had finished with normality long ago.
 
They barely looked human now, white and unclothed.
 
Something dark

Blood

coated their naked
chests, which showed ribs like the keys of xylophones.
 
Bones poked through leathery skin at every
possible point.

The one on the
end, a black-eyed demon, smiled and revealed its fangs.

Mom screamed.

The vampire
leapt.
 
In an instant, Amber raised the
lighter and aimed the wasp spray through the flame.
 
A solid jet of fire lashed out and struck the
creature mid-air.
 
It screeched and fell
to the floor.
 
Inert now, it burned with
the intensity of gasoline-soaked kindling.
 
The other two tried to draw back, but they had committed to their
charge.
 
Amber swept the makeshift
flamethrower across their bodies, setting them ablaze.
 
They caught easily.

Lighting flashed
from the barrel of Mom’s pistol.
 
Something heavy fell off the shelf behind her head.
 

“Paper!” Mom
barked.
 
“Set it on fire!
 
Burn everything!”

Bathroom tissue, napkins
and paper towels lined shelves stretching into the darkness into which they’d
have to go if they ever hoped to reach the door.
 
Mom shoved her and she charged down the
aisle, shooting flame in short bursts.
 
Bales of paper products caught fire easily, revealing things that
squealed and screeched before falling backwards off the shelves.
 
Something forward, right in her path, and she
torched it without thinking, moving past its writhing carcass.

Go, go, GO!

Behind her, Mom’s
pistol whipcracked again and again.
 
Her
left hand, the one with the lighter, exploded in sudden pain and she dropped
it.
 
She reached into her pocket and came
out with the other one, a cooler one.
 
She flicked the wheel once, twice, three times before it caught.
 
The little flame licked up just beyond her
throbbing left thumb and she swept fire down the aisle on either side.

Everything burned
now.
 
Fire consumed the toilet paper, the
tissues and towels.
 
They emerged from
the paper goods aisle and she caught movement out of the corner of her left
eye.
 
Another one of the screeching
bonebags fell and in the light of its immolation she saw what stood behind it.

Dozens of them my God they’re everywhere

She became
conscious now of the growing lightness of the wasp spray can.
 
In just a few seconds, she’d be out.

“Amber!”

Charging forward,
Mom pointed the pistol in her direction.
 
She pulled the trigger and it flashed once.
 
Something whizzed past her head.
 
Amber turned to see a dark shape fall to the
ground, try to get up.

She aimed the wasp
spray and torched it.
 

More of them,
charging forward now from the grocery section where they’d sprung their
trap.
 
Running from Electronics,
streaming through Clothing.
 
Cutting them
off along the main aisle that ran to the entryway, to daylight, to safety.
 
Surrounding them.

The pistol clicked
empty.

Amber cast a
stream of burning wasp spray, much shorter now than it had been, across the
racks of clothing through which she heard those things coming.
 
Nothing caught.
 

The can sputtered,
sighed and quit.

The vampires
formed a ring around them, a circle broken only by the paper goods aisle,
blazing now in full force.
 
They didn’t
like the fire and shied from it, but this afforded her and Mom no protection
and no way out because it was hot.
 
She
felt it all the way over here.
 
They
couldn’t go in there; they’d roast, or die from inhaling the smoke slowly
building in the store’s now-unventilated space.
 
And even if they could go there, even if they could make it through the
heat and the smoke, the only way out of the store lay in the back.
 
Through those dark storerooms.

Mom pulled her
close.
 
Her breath was hot and fast on
her neck.

“I love you,” Mom
whispered.
 

“I love you, too.”

When the generator
cut off, Justin only had time to blink twice before the lights died and plunged
him into darkness.
 
His stomach turned to
concrete, his blood to ice.
 
He veered in
the dark and collided with a shelf of canned goods, hard.
 
Bright pain bloomed in his face, but he
ignored it.
 
He had bigger problems.

Navigating by
memory, he made his way back to his cart.
 
He had nearly found a handhold on the sheer cliff face of panic when
Heather screamed, “Justin!”

No—she didn’t
scream.
 
She
shrieked
, a cry of utter terror barely recognizable as the voice of
a grown woman.

He shoved his
hands into the cart, felt around for the box he knew was there.
 
The handheld spotlight
.
 
Vampires had to operate in
the dark.
 
Had to.

They operated just fine at the jail.

Those were fluorescent
lights.
 
This portable spotlight wasn’t
fluorescent.
 
This was the real deal, the
real motherfucking deal.
 
Electric, yeah,
but not fluorescent, and that had to count for something.

Goddamn, where
was
it?

Heather screamed
again.
 
There came a hiss and a whoosh
and the quality of the darkness seemed to change then, as if someone had
flipped a light switch far away.
 
Explosive gunfire.

His hands closed
around the box and he ripped it free of the peanut butter and jelly and canned
tuna and beans and everything else he’d thrown in the basket on his mad
shopping spree.
 
His fingers tore at the
cardboard.
 
Staples pierced his skin, but
he barely felt this as he ripped the spotlight from its packing.
 
Batteries were supposedly included.
 
Hopefully they were already installed.

A terrible mewling
screech cut through the air.
 
He winced,
but his fingers found the light’s pistol grip.
 
He pointed it up ahead, pulled the trigger.
 
One million candlepower erupted with the
power of a small sun.

A shelf of Bush’s
Baked Beans emerged from the darkness, but nothing with fangs leapt with
it.
 
In the near distance, Heather
hollered something about burning everything.
 
Justin zeroed in on this voice and ran along the aisle, the beam
jiggling before him.

God please God please God please

He emerged from
the canned goods aisle onto the main thoroughfare that separated the grocery
section from everything else.
 
The square
of sunlight signifying the presence of the front door stood just beyond the
produce section, nothing between him and escape but a few pumpkins and bagged
apples.
 
He turned away from this to face
the back of the store, which glowed now with orange fire.
 
The gun fired, something screeched back there
and in the flickering light, Justin saw Amber with what looked like a
flamethrower.
 
Wherever the hell she’d
gotten one of those.

Go.
 
They’re done for.
 
Get gone before
you are, too.

“AMBER!” he shouted.
 
“HEATHER!”

The figures
reacted not at all to his voice, and he understood that they didn’t hear him,
couldn’t hear him.
 
Skittering noises
ahead and to the right, more of those things approaching from elsewhere in the
store.
 
He saw Amber and her mother as
silhouettes against the flames.

And then he
couldn’t see them at all.
 
Other figures,
spindly figures, hunched over with the weight of what had happened to them,
stepped in the way.

No.

A clear shot to
the front door lay right behind him.

Take it.
 
This damn light is no good and you know it those things will bite you
and then you’ll be just like them so GET OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW
He charged forward.

Break her neck
, something dark and
hopeless in Heather’s core urged.
 
Don’t let her go like this.

But she
couldn’t.
 
The girl stood tall as she now
and had to bend to get her face into that spot between Heather’s neck and
shoulder where she had sought comfort as an infant.
 
Heather felt her trembling.

“I’m sorry,”
Heather whispered, voice breaking.
 
Running footsteps fell on her ears as more of those things hurried to
the feast.
 
“I…”

Before she could
finish, bright light exploded before her face.
 
Vampires squealed.

She opened her
eyes.
 
Justin charged out of the
darkness, brandishing what looked like a cartoon version of a flashlight.
 
He pivoted with a dancer’s grace and swept
the beam all around them.
 
Dark, skinny
figures mewled and raised their hands to cover their faces.
 
Hope bubbled in Heather’s chest as they
backed away from this new threat.