The Last Days of October Read Online Free PDF

can work all this other bullshit out if he’s in there, I’m sorry,
I’m sorry, I’M SORRY.
    But Mike wouldn’t
be in there.   She knew this on a very
fundamental level as she climbed the porch steps.   Mike knew where she had gone, knew where they had gone.   He knew how to get there.   When the shit hit the fan down here, he’d
have come to get them.   He’d have done
this no matter what she’d said to him before they left.
    I will cover him with a sheet so she won’t
see him.   She will not see his dead face.
    “Mike?”   she called out.   “It’s me!   We’re home!   We’re okay!”
    No response.   Closer now, she could study the cross.   Mike—or whoever had applied it—had stood too
close to the door when he sprayed it, and it had run.   Little tendrils had dribbled and dried,
giving it the same rushed appearance as the others.
    With her leading
foot, she reached forward and pushed open the door.   When nothing jumped out at her, she peered
into the foyer and stepped across the threshold.
    Just beyond the
door, the sofa stuck part of the way out of the living room, as if Mike had
tried to move it into the foyer.
    “I’m home!”   Louder this time, fear creeping in from the
edges.   Her voice vanished up the stairs
and into the darkness of the second floor.   Again, no answer.
    But she hadn’t
expected one.   Fighting to keep stomach
acid from reaching up and burning her throat, she sidled through the gap
between the edge of the couch and the wooden banister and made her way up the
hall into the kitchen.
    Mike had cleaned
up the mess from his tantrum, but the refrigerator had migrated from its pocket
in the wall next to the dishwasher to the back door.   The loose power cord lay across one scuffed
floor tile.   Sunlight made its way in
through the gauzy white curtains covering the window over the sink.   Next to the sink lay a hammer, a saw and
several boards.   It didn’t take a degree
in crime scene investigation to know Mike had been planning to nail the window
shut.
    She continued
through the dining room to the living room.   On its way to the foyer, the sofa had knocked aside the coffee table and
loveseat like rowboats before an ocean liner.   The curtains were drawn in here, darkening the room in a way she found
disturbing.   She threw them open.   Immediately, the room flooded with sunlight.   Her eyes fell on the coffee table.   There, face down atop of three months’ worth
of Amber’s Glamour magazines, sat her
grandmother’s Holy Bible.
    She blinked.   She could count on one hand with several
amputated fingers the number of times Michael Palmer had ever even touched a
Bible, much less opened one.   Yet here
lay her grandmother’s copy.   Heather
turned it over and read the passage to which Mike had opened it to the Book of
Isaiah.
    Therefore the anger of the Lord is aroused
against His people; He has stretched out His hand against them and stricken
them, and the hills trembled.   Their
carcasses were as refuse in the midst of the streets.
    She slammed the
book shut and dropped it on the coffee table.   Then she continued through the home.
    She found nothing
upstairs.   His clothes remained on their
hangers in the closet, his toiletries a typical scattered mess on the bathroom
vanity.   Everything remained as it had
been when they’d left to go camping.   No
clues.
    Except for
one.   A box of 9mm bullets lay open on
the nightstand, and Mike’s Ruger P89 pistol was gone from its box in the
closet.   She finally found it on the
floor downstairs in the foyer, just behind the door that had concealed it from
view when she first arrived.   She bent
over and picked it up.   It held a full
magazine.
    He’d left the
safety off.
    “Where are
you?”   she whispered.   The gun felt cold and heavy.   Ugly, like knowing that whatever had happened
to Mike had happened because she had booted him from the camping trip.
    He’s okay.   Wherever he is,