Read Online The Last Days of October by Jackson Spencer Bell - Free Book Online Page B

attack when I
saw you.   Where’s Amber?”
    “Home,” she
said.   “We were camping.   We came back yesterday and everybody’s gone.”
    “Welcome home,” he
said.   “Deep Shit Creek.”
    She pursed her lips
and shrugged.  
    “You seen anybody
else?”   he asked.
    “You’re the
first.”
    “Well,
goddamn.”   He sighed and slumped even
further.   Clyde lived alone, she
remembered.   Mike said he had been
married three times, but none of these unions had produced children.   He spent his days collecting his military
pension and hanging out at the American Legion hall.   He had no one to mourn.   His life, she reflected, had been lonely even
before this happened.
    “I was drunk off
my ass,” he said.
    “Come again?”
    “That’s how I made
it.   When those things came knocking, I
was passed out in my living room.   Folks
always said the drink would kill me, but it sure saved my shit this time.   Isn’t that something?”
    “It is.”   She turned and looked at the rest of the
store.   Sunlight from the great glass
windows penetrated halfway down the building’s length, slacking and fading down
at the first break in the rows of neatly-shelved goods.   Then the shadows took over.   The camping section was in the back, of
course.   Everything she needed, back
there in the dark.
    She wondered if
vampires slept during the day.
    “What
happened?   How is any of this even
possible?” she asked, turning back around.  
    Stepping out of
the doorway, Clyde walked over to a stack of bagged insecticide granules and
sat down.   He shrugged.   “I have no idea,” he said.   “These bitches just…took over.   I don’t know where they came from; it’s like
a fuckin’ plague or something.   The rage
of Jesus H. Christ.   First night, we lose
power, internet, phones.   We also lose
about three quarters of the population.   Twenty thousand people, gone like that. ”
    He snapped his
fingers.
    “Next morning, I
sober up and wake up on my floor.   It
takes me until about two in the afternoon to wander outside to find out exactly
what the goddamn fuck is going on with all my utilities.   None of my neighbors are home, and I mean,
like, none.   I try driving over to your place to look for
Mike and he’s not there, either.   So I
just cruise around.  
    “About two thirty,
I come down here to see if anyone knows anything.   There’s a crew of guys boarding up the jail,
and I say hey, what’s going on, and they say, somebody in there got bit and now
they’ve all gone over.   I ask, bit by
what?   Gone over where ?   They tell me to
either get a hammer and help or shut the fuck up and go on because they have to
get this done before the sun goes down.   I’ve never really been one for hammers and nails, so I shut the fuck up
and go on.   Go around to the front of the
courthouse and I see them doing that. ”
    He jabbed his
finger at the storefront, at the bodies hanging across the street.
    Heather breathed
through her nose.   Her stomach
crawled.   “Who are they?”
    “Them?   Queers.   The ones they could find, anyway.”
    Heather’s skin
tingled.   “Who’s ‘they?’”
    “Everybody who
made it through the first night.”
    “Everybody?”
    His homely face
was somber, expressionless.   He shrugged,
as if the answer was of no consequence.   “Shit, I don’t know if it was literally everybody, but it was a lot of
fuckers out there.   They were like, this is
the Lord’s doing.   Pretty damn convinced
of it, too.”
    Heather thought of
her grandmother’s Bible, open to Isaiah.   Mike had been reading it.
    Clyde laughed
then, actually laughed, like he’d made a funny joke.   What’d
the man say when the horse walked into the bar?   Hey, you see those queers get lynched in front of the courthouse?   Hee hee hee.   “Ain’t that some shit?   You got vampires running all over, getting
into people’s houses and biting this and biting that and these