Read The Last Days of October for Free Online Page A

the window.   The floorboards
screamed under her shifting weight.   She
wanted to scream back at them to be quiet.   Above her head, footsteps crossed the ceiling and a door creaked
open.   Amber getting up.   Making enough noise to wake the dead in the
process.  
    Heather darted
into the foyer to the bottom of the stairs.   The front door, windowless and silent, was a black hole in the
darkness.   Beyond it, the porch creaked
with the presence of someone walking on it.
    She leveled the
pistol at the front door.
    “There are people
outside,” Amber whispered, descending the stairs and joining her in the
foyer.   “A bunch of them standing in the
yard.”
    “Who are
they?   Are they armed?”
    “I can’t really
see them,” she said.   Her lips were a
tight line of worry, her arms coiled around her chest in a self-administered
hug.   “Too dark.”
    Heather
swallowed.   The creaking had
stopped.   Whoever was out there stood now
just beyond the door.   Marauders, she
thought, lawless survivors of whatever had gone down in Deep Creek while they
were away.   They had seen two lone
females earlier today and came now in the night to surprise them as they slept,
to drag them away for who knew what purpose.  
    Heather thumbed
off the safety with one hand while she pushed Amber backwards with another.
    “Go back upstairs
and hide,” she hissed.  
    “No!   I’m staying with you!”
    Frustration
throbbed.   She wanted to yell at Amber to
quit being so stubborn, but she didn’t dare.
    “Go upstairs,” she
repeated in a low but firm voice, “and hide.”
    Before Amber could
respond to that, the presence on the other side of the door knocked.   Her eyes widened as she backed up one
step.   Heather swallowed and turned.
    Knock knock knock .
    She aimed the
pistol at the door again.
    “Who’s there?”
    The knocker
paused.   Heather was about to announce that
she had a gun, that she would shoot without hesitation, when he spoke.
    “Heather?   It’s me.   Open up.”
    Mike.

 
    6.

 
    In a flash of
understanding, she realized that there really was a God and while He periodically did very bad things, He actually
did love Heather Palmer.   He’d sent her
husband back.   Wiped out everybody else,
left nothing behind but leaves and crosses.   And Mike.
    Her grip on the
pistol loosened as she lowered it, turning to Amber.   “It’s your dad!”
    Amber’s eyes
widened.   She glanced in horror at the
door, shook her head, her face white.   Ridiculous, because her father had come home and didn’t she want to see him?   Didn’t she want them all to reunite?
    “No,” she
said.   “Mom, it’s not…”
    “Heather?   Let me in.”
    She pressed the pistol
into Amber’s hands.   “Hold this!”   She felt her lips spreading into a
ridiculously wide grin.   She spun and
charged towards the door.
    “I’m right here!”
she cried out.   “Hang on!”
    “MOM!   STOP!”
    Her hands shook as
she flipped the deadbolt.   Her fingers
slipped and trembled in their efforts to disengage the knob lock, but they did
it and closed around the knob itself.   She turned it.   She pulled the
door open.
    “NO!”
    He stood on the
porch, just beyond the threshold.
    Amber screamed.
    Raising her arms
to welcome him inside, Heather heard the flies before the sight registered in
her brain.   They covered him by the
thousands, on his face, his hands, in his hair, fat little raisins with
beating, buzzing wings.   They swirled
around the twin black pools of his eyes—not brown eyes, black eyes, two lumps of charcoal set in a flyblown face.   He opened his mouth with a funeral of a
smile.
    Oh God oh God WHAT IS THAT
    The wind shifted
outside and blew in with it the stench of death and disease and a hundred
putrid things.   The Mike-thing opened its
mouth and invaded her house with the gravewind of its breath.   Just enough moonlight flowed in around it to
display its
    fangs, those are fangs
    teeth.