The Last Days of October Read Online Free PDF Page B

he’s okay; guys like Mike don’t go down easily.   If anybody could survive whatever happened
here, it would be him.
    Amber stood
outside on the porch, arms folded, nervously glancing up and down the
street.   Heather opened the screen door
to admit her.
    “Where is
he?”   Amber asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    She took Amber on
the nickel tour of the Palmer House of Horrors, saying little.   When they finished, Amber sat at the bottom
of the stairs and cradled her head in her hands.
    “Oh my God,” she
moaned.
    “It could have
been worse; I could have found him in here dead.   We can still hope.”
    “How?”   Amber asked.
    Good question.   Heather turned and looked through the screen
door.   Beyond the porch, brown and gold
leaves littered the yard, the sidewalk, the street.   The temperature was falling as the day aged;
it would get cold tonight.
    And it would get
dark.   Her watch said it was half past
four; at this time of the year, sunset would approach quickly.   Another wave of foreboding washed over her
insides as she considered the oncoming night.   Suddenly, she wanted nothing less than to remain here when night arrived
in Deep Creek.
    But she didn’t
want to be on the road, either.   Not at
night.
    “So what do we do
now?”   Amber asked.
    “I have no idea,”
Heather said.   “But I think it’s going to
involve us driving to Burlington in the morning and seeing if we can find
anybody there.   If not, we ride on and go
to the army base at Fort
Bragg.   If there was an evacuation or civil emergency
or something, people around here would go there.”
    “We should check
the high school first.   Don’t people
usually seek shelter in gyms and stuff?   We could go now.   It’s not far.”
    No, it
wasn’t.   But outside, the wind blew and
rustled the leaves, and Heather felt its chill even within the confines of her
home.
    Stay put, it said.   And
stay quiet.
    “We will,” Heather
said.   “Tomorrow.   But right now, let’s get the truck
unloaded.   It’s getting late.”

 
    5.

 
    Heather had no
parents.   She’d had them once, but only
for a short while; they existed only in halting flashes of memory that churned
intense feelings but provided little else.   Framed photographs of her mother that stood on almost every flat surface
in her grandmother’s house in Wilmington showed a pretty young woman with long,
straight hair parted down the middle.   Heather grew up and her grandmother grew older, but the woman in the
pictures didn’t age.   She watched the
progress of years from within the four corners of these reddish-tinged
photographs, where nothing changed and time remained static.  
    But she had no
pictures of her father.   Her grandmother
and the various family members who occasionally visited did not speak of him or
even hint at his existence.   Consequently, Heather never thought to even ask about him until
kindergarten, when her classmates spoke of their fathers and it occurred to her
that logically, she must have had one too.   Even if he had, as she understood, died at the same time as her mother.
    So on the way home
from school one fall afternoon, she asked, “Grandma, can I have a picture of my
daddy?”
    Her grandmother
stiffened visibly behind the wheel of her Buick LeSabre.   The color drained from her face, and in that
instant Heather felt a flash of guilt.
    “No, sweetie.   We don’t have any pictures of your
daddy.   They’re all gone.”
    “Can you call his
mommy and daddy?   They might have
pictures of him.   Maybe they can give me
one.”
    Her grandmother’s
hands became white-knuckled claws around the skinny steering wheel.   For a long time, she didn’t speak.   Heather tried furiously to rewind time and
un-ask the question.
    “We can’t do
that,” she said.   “His mommy and daddy
are gone, too.”
    The truth came to
light later, of course; it was bound to, if for no other reason than a small
child gets older and