The Last Days of October Read Free Page A

walking around
with leaf blowers.   She shivered as a new
housing development flashed by on the left just before the high school.   The General Electric plant approached on the
right and fell behind them.
    She glanced in the
rearview mirror.   The employee parking
lot at GE teemed with cars.   From the
outside, it looked for all the world like business as usual.   As long as she ignored the complete absence
of traffic on the outer edges of Deep Creek and the dead air on her radio, she
could pretend all of this was normal.
    Please let him be okay, she silently
prayed.   She had ignored God for most of
her adult life, but He now felt medievally close.   Dunked in the water, washed
in the blood, she prayed.   Please let Mike be okay.   I know I said some really mean stuff the
other day and I know I thought even
meaner stuff but I didn’t mean any of it and all I want in this world is to see
him again so PLEASE LET HIM BE OKAY
    “What?”   Amber asked.
    “I didn’t say
anything.”
    “Yes, you
did.   Your lips are moving.”
    Heather swallowed.
    “I’m praying,” she
said.
    She swung off
Burlington Road onto Third Street.   The
outer business district retreated before a neighborhood of grand old Craftsman homes
with rambling porches and long roofs that gave no indication of what had
happened here.   She slowed to a crawl for
a better look.   She searched for anything
out of place—bodies, burned cars, damaged homes, anything to erase this giant
question mark.
    Beside her, Amber
drew a ragged breath as her eyes filled with tears.   “Should we stop?”   she asked.   “Knock on a door or something, see if anybody’s home?   I mean, maybe something did happen, but
there’s no way they can all be gone,
right?   Mom?”
    Heather wasn’t
listening.   Outside her window, the
two-story homes lining Third Street stared back at her.   These houses were older than the others
farther out, their construction predating the time when cost efficiency
demanded that each home be a carbon copy of its neighbor.   The trees had grown here, and now they
reached above the rooflines with branches from which they drizzled golden
leaves upon neat and well-manicured lawns.   The grass had grown nearly invisible with no one to rake the
leaves.   They covered the grass and the
sidewalk and danced now in the street to the music of a light autumn breeze and
the choir of desertion.
    Just then,
something else about the houses caught Heather’s eye.   She slowed, and then stopped completely.
    Along both sides
of Third Street, front doors stood open to the leafy yards.   Some stood open all the way, some not so
much.   But they all stood open.   And on the front door of the home nearest
where she’d stopped, someone had painted a cross in black spray paint.
    It was a man-size
cross, the stipes extending from top to bottom and the patibulum spanning the
width of the door.   The artist had
evidently worked in haste, with little care to the symmetry of his creation; he
hadn’t painted the cross on his door as much as slashed it there with the brush
or spray can.   This haphazard appearance
lent it a panicked quality that Heather felt crawling in the pit of her
stomach.
    There were others
just like it up and down the street.   Although she couldn’t see every door from her vantage point in the Durango’s driver’s seat,
she felt certain that most, if not all, of the houses bore similar
crosses.   Signals, perhaps, from the
inhabitants or the government that the same danger that had struck their
neighbors had also struck them and that those approaching the door should stop
lest they also fall victim to it.
    But why a
Christian cross?
    Heather
shuddered.   On the other side of the
glass, dead leaves scraped along the street and hissed on the inundated
sidewalks and lawns.   Millions, billions
of dead leaves along this street and a hundred thousand others, all lined with
houses that stood staring at the remains of