Contents
Title Page
Part One - Altruism
Flat Tire
House
Entry
Part Two - Denial
Vampires
Home
Cellar
Home
Part Three - Sacrifice
Visitors
Assessment
Ditch
Coming
Part Four - Redemption
Explosion
Dark
Light
Shadows
Sun
Sterile
Part Five - Rebirth
Growth
Betrayal
Submission
About
More - Stay Away
More - Fiero's Pizza
More - Migrators
UNTIL THE SUN GOES DOWN
BY
IKE HAMILL
WWW.IKEHAMILL.COM
Dedication:
For Mr. King. When I was a kid, your books scared the bejesus out of me. I’ve been trying to recapture that feeling ever since.
Special Thanks:
Thanks to Christine, for suggesting this story.
Thanks to Lynne, as always, for her edits.
Copyright © 2019 Ike Hamill
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events have been fabricated only to entertain. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the consent of Ike Hamill.
PART ONE:
Altruism
Flat Tire
(Here's what happened the other day.)
Here’s what happened the other day:
The steering wheel jerked to the right when the tire blew. It felt like a tremendous animal, lurking in the tall grass that grew right alongside the road, had struck out and snagged the tire in its gnashing teeth.
The brakes locked up and a cloud of dust enveloped my rusty truck. The back end of the truck shifted to the left so I was effectively blocking the road. Granted, I had only been in the area a handful of days, but I hadn’t seen another soul on that stretch of dirt road. I straightened the truck out anyway so I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way.
The rubber was grinding on the wheel—I could feel it.
I was sweating like a pig before I even opened the door. The only thing keeping me cool had been the moving air. Now that the truck was stopped, everything was perfectly still. If I had stood in one place for too long, I probably would have used up all the oxygen and suffocated.
The hood of the truck was about ten-thousand degrees. I made the mistake of touching it as I went around to see the shredded tire. I can’t imagine how the thing just disintegrated like that. Strands of treacherous metal poked out from the rubber.
I glanced at my unblemished, soft palms, saying goodbye to smooth skin. There was no way I was going to change that tire without cutting and scraping the hell out of my fingers. Sweat rolled down my forehead and the middle of my back.
I’m a pretty self-reliant guy. Maybe that’s the wrong word. It’s not like I have a bunch of confidence in my own ability, I just hate interacting with strangers. There’s that feeling when you have to extend yourself. You have to ask for help and admit that you are out of your element. I try to avoid that feeling at all costs. But in this case, with the sun practically burning the skin off the back of my neck and a shredded tire, I reached for my phone.
No signal.
I mean, of course there was no signal. I was maybe three or four miles away from the house, and there was no signal there. Even in the center of town there was only one bar on the display and I had crossed over a big hill before I turned off the Prescott Road.
I put my phone back in my pocket and dabbed my forehead with my shirt.
“Wait!”
There was something I had read before I moved to the middle of nowhere. It was about emergencies and cellphones. They said that if you dial 9-1-1, your phone will connect to whatever it can find, even if the tower is not on your network. They said that even if you don’t have a SIM card, the phone will find a way.
Was this an emergency?
I sighed. No, this was not an emergency. People got in real trouble for bothering dispatch. Maybe if I was ninety years old, or had a small child or something. But I was, ostensibly, a perfectly healthy thirty-five-year-old dude, not obese or crippled. I put the phone away a second time.
There were three obvious choices—walk, change the tire, or try to drive on the rim. The third was the dumbest. I almost did it anyway just because it required the least amount of effort. That’s how hot it was.
Rather, that’s how hot it felt. I mean, there are plenty of hotter places in the world. One time I visited Arizona in the summer and it was like your lungs were cooking every time you took a breath. There were misters over sidewalks. Without them I’m sure that people would have collapsed and fried like an egg on the concrete. Still, people survived there and probably didn’t drive on their rims when they got a flat.
The chrome door handle was almost too hot to touch. The hinges creaked and I felt around behind the seat, looking for the jack. I found the tire iron. The paint was chipped and rusted, just like the rest of the truck. I don’t remember what year the vehicle was—seventy-two? When I registered it, the clerk laughed at the mileage.
“Get out much?” she asked.
The mileage I copied down from the odometer was exactly fifty-one more than the previous time the truck had been registered, and that was four years before.
“Oh. I don’t know. I inherited it from my uncle,” I said.
I’m not sure where Uncle Walt got the truck from. Like his weird old farmhouse—he had left me that too—it had just always been there at the end of the dirt road that didn’t have a name, just a number.
Anyway, that’s all I found behind the seat. No jack, just a rusty tire iron. The spare, I knew about. That was sitting in the bed of the truck. When I went to get the truck inspected, they had refused to put a sticker on it until I agreed to buy a spare tire from them. Afraid to be swindled, I had insisted on looking myself. The guy showed me where it would have been mounted if it existed.
“It was an optional accessory,” he said, “but it would have been mounted up under here, between the axle and the
