The Last Days of October Read Free

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.
    Her head suddenly
swam with the vision of a pile of dead men and women staring sightlessly at the
ceiling.   Their lips spoke no words, but
their mottled faces betrayed the disease that had driven them into the
bathroom.   They had fallen to a bug that
had existed on its own in some dark corner of Africa
or the Amazon for hundreds of years before a human picked it up and brought it
home.   They had died with blood streaming
from their noses and ears and eyes as their throats swelled shut and choked
them to death from the inside.   They
would stink, but no flies would buzz about their bodies; the very air would be
pure poison.
      “What is it?”   Amber asked.  
    “I don’t know,”
Heather said.   To the door, she called
out, “Hello?   Is anyone in there?   Are you injured?”
    Nothing.  
    Her nerves, coiled
like tightly wound springs, felt ready to pop.
    “On second
thought,” she said, stepping away from the door, “let’s leave these be.”
    Heather swept the
store again with her eyes.   The sun
blazing through the glass made it warm in here even though the air outside bore
a seasonable October chill.   Beyond the
abandoned Suburban lay the road.   Past
that, a long row of double-stacked mailboxes perched beside the start of a
dirty road announced the presence of a trailer park behind the trees.   A big trailer park, judging from the number
of mailboxes.   Beside the gas station, a
livestock fence marked the border with a vast open field of grass and dozens of
wandering cattle.
    But no people.
    She thought now of
the silence in the morning sky as they had packed the truck, the stillness
there as they hiked the woods one last time before leaving.   The old man who owned the land hadn’t come to
the door when she’d knocked to thank him for letting them camp there, but she
had assumed then that he just hadn’t been home.
    “Can you remember
seeing any other cars on the road this morning?”   she asked Amber.   “When was the last time we saw another car or
person?”
    Amber looked away
as she thought it over, then swallowed.   “Right before we set up camp.   When you stopped to tell that old dude we were there.”
    Oh my God.
    A nucleus of dread
pulsed now in Heather’s center, emitting nothing but rivers of cold blood.   It sucked the light from the atmosphere
around her and dimmed the sun.   Something
had happened here, something bad, but it had happened elsewhere, too, and
probably everywhere.   Because this store,
she felt, had been deserted for days.   And no one from the trailer park next door had come over to loot it.
    “We need to get
out of here,” Heather said, taking Amber’s hand and pulling her towards the
door.   “Now.”

 
    3.

 
    “How about now?”
    Amber shook her phone.   She waved it from side to side, searching for
the signal that had eluded them since the Shell station.   “Still nothing.”
    “Take it off of
airplane mode.”
    “It’s not on airplane mode, Mom, I just don’t have
any bars.”
    The state of
abandonment in the Shell station extended to the south on Highway 49.   On either side of the Durango, the empty fields and tobacco sheds
gave way to houses that grew closer together as they crossed into the Deep
Creek city limits and 49 became Burlington Road.   Plenty of cars, none of them in motion.   No one raking leaves, no one