Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  Maria had been with him for fifteen years. A scruffy, tan mutt, her muzzle gone gray and her eyes rheumy, they were walking life’s last mile together. Carlos had never married; he’d become so acclimated to his loneliness that eventually the very idea of human companionship just made him antsy and tired. It was not as though he’d had to fight for his independence; his demeanor had grown cold and mean as he aged, not from any ill-feeling toward other people, but simply from an unwillingness to endure their eccentricities. He had a theory that people warped as they aged, like old records left out in the sun, and unless you did it together and warped in conformity to each other, you eventually became incapable of aligning with anybody else.

  Well, he’d grown old with Maria, that grand old dame, and she was all he needed or wanted.

  When the tremors had started in Fleming, and the nights started filling with the screams of neighbors and strangers alike, he and Maria had huddled together in his apartment. He’d kept his baseball bat clutched in his thin, spotted hands while Maria bristled and growled at his side. She’d always been a gentle dog, frightened by visitors, scurrying under the bed at a loud knock, but now she had found a core of steel within herself and she stood between him and the door, her lips peeled from her yellowed teeth, prepared to hurl her frail old body against whatever might come through it. That, even more than the screaming outside, convinced him that whatever was out there was something to fear.

  On the second night, the door was kicked in and bright flashlights sprayed into his apartment, the commanding voices of men piling into the room like something physical. Maria’s whole body shook and snapped with fear and rage, her own hoarse barking pushing back at them, but when Carlos recognized what they were saying, he wrapped his arms around his dog and held her tight, whispering in her ear. “It’s okay baby, it’s okay little mama, calm down, calm down. Calm down.”

  And she did, though she still trembled. The police, one of them sobbing unashamedly, loaded them both into a van parked at the bottom of the apartment building, not giving him any grief about taking the dog, thank God. He cast a quick glance down the street before a hand shoved him inside with a few of his terrified neighbors, huddled in their pajamas, and slammed the door behind him. What he saw was impossible. A man, eight feet tall or more, skinny as a handful of sticks, crossing a street only a block away with eerie, doe-like grace. He was a shape in the sodium lights, featureless and indistinct, like a child’s drawing of a nightmare. He was stretching what looked like thin, bloody parchment from one streetlight to another; suspended from one end of the parchment was a human arm, flexing at the elbow again and again, like an animal in distress.

  He looked at his neighbors, but he didn’t know any of their names. They weren’t talking, anyway.

  Then the van surged to life, moving with ferocious speed to a location only a mile distant, behind a battery of checkpoints and blockades, and rings of armed officers.

  Carlos and his dog were provided with a small apartment—even smaller than the one they’d been living in—in tenement housing, with as many of the other residents of the besieged neighborhood as could be evacuated. The building was overcrowded, and the previous residents received these newcomers with a gamut of reactions ranging from sympathy to resentment to outright anger. The refugees greeted their new hosts in kind.

  No one knew exactly what was happening in South Kensington and Fleming. Rumors spread that a tribe of kids, homeless or in gangs or God knows what, had started charging people to go in looking for people or items of value left behind, or sometimes even chaperoning people to their old homes. Though some minor effort had been made to quell these activities, the little industry managed to thrive. It disgusted Carlos; someone was always ready to make a dollar, no matter what the circumstance.

  It was thanks to them, though, that news bled back of the old neighborhood transformed, stalked by weird figures pushing wheelbarrows or hauling huge carts of human wreckage, strange music drifting from empty streets, the tall figures—surgeons, some called them—knitting people together in grotesque configurations. Buildings were empty, some completely hollowed out, as though cored from within, leaving nothing but their outer shells. The kids sneaking back inside starting calling it Hollow City, and the name stuck. Which was just one more thing Carlos hated. The old place had a name. Two names, in fact. There was a history there, lives had been lived there. It didn’t deserve some stupid comic book tag. It had belonged to humanity once.

  A gray pallor hung over the place, slowly expanding until most of the real city was covered. Carlos believed it was responsible for the way people acclimated too quickly to the transformation of the old neighborhoods. Apathy took root like a weed. Police kept up the blockades, but they were indifferently manned, and the kids’ scouting efforts grew in proportion. The Army never came in. No one in the tenements knew whether or not they were even called. There was nothing about this on the news. It was as though the city suffered its own private nightmare, which would continue unobserved until it could wake up and talk about it, or until it died in its sleep.

  Carlos was resigned to let it play out in the background. He was nothing if not adaptive, and it did not take long for him to accept his reduced surroundings. It was noisy, chaotic, the walls were thin, but these things had been true of his old apartment, too. Sound was a comfort to him; he might not have friends, but his spirit was eased by the human commotion. He would have died there, as close to contentment as he might get, if only Maria had stayed with him.

  He knew Maria was gone almost instantly, well before he hobbled out of bed and saw the apartment door ajar. He could feel her absence, like a pocket of airlessness. And he knew immediately that she’d gone back to her old home. What he didn’t know was why. Was there something there that called her? Was she confused? Did the place mean more to her than he did? Her absence almost felt like a betrayal, like a spade digging into his heart.

  But she was Maria. He would go and get her. He would bring her home.

  ___

  Everything had gone lax at the border to the old neighborhood. The checkpoints seemed to be devoid of the police altogether; only these kids now, living in makeshift shacks, sleeping on mattresses harvested from local housing or perhaps from the afflicted area, living out of boxes and suitcases and school backpacks. Carlos knew he ought to be grateful for it, because it would only help him get back inside, but a part of him couldn’t help but despair for the continued decline of responsibilities and standards in the hands of this privileged youth. It’s good to be old, he thought. I’ll be dead before they’ve finished their work on this world.

  It took a while to find anybody willing to give him the time of day. He knew they considered him too risky: old, slow, fragile. But eventually he found one who would: a girl with a shaved head, dressed in a dark blue hoodie and jeans, who called herself Mix. Ridiculous name; why did they do that? Why couldn’t they just be who they were? She considered the three crumpled twenties he offered her, and accepted them with poor grace. She turned her back to him, reaching into a box she kept by her sleeping bag and jamming it with bottles of water, a first aid kit, and what looked like a folded knife. She interrogated him as she packed.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Maria,” he said.

  She stopped, turned and looked at him with something like contempt. “You know she’s dead, right?”

  “No. I don’t know that at all.”

  “Do you know anything about what’s going on in there?”

  He flashed back to the tall man—one of the surgeons, he supposed—stretching the twitching human parchment between streetlights. “Sure,” he said. “It’s Hell.”

  “Who knows what the fuck it is, but there’s no one left alive in there. At least, no one that can be saved.”

  A swell of impatience threatened to overwhelm him. He would go in alone if he had to. What he would not do was stand here being condescended to by an infant. “Do you want my money or not?” />
  “Yeah I want it. But you have to follow my rules, okay? Stay quiet and stay moving. Keep to the sidewalks at all times, and close to the walls when you can. They mostly ignore stragglers, unless they’re traveling in big groups or making some kinda scene. If one of them notices you, stay still. Usually they just move on.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “Then I make it up on the fly. And you do exactly what I fucking say.” She waited until he acknowledged this before continuing. “And whenever we realize this Maria or whoever is dead, we get the fuck out again. Like, immediately.”

  “She’s not dead.”

  Mix zipped up her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “Yeah, okay. Maybe you think you’re the hero in a movie or something. You’re not. You’re just some old guy making a bad choice. So listen to me. Once I’m sure she’s dead, I am leaving. If you come with me I’ll make sure you get back out safe. If you stay behind, that’s on you.”

  “Fine. Can we go?”

  “Yeah, let’s go. Where are we looking?”

  “Home. She’ll have gone home.” He gave her the address.

  She sighed. “Old man, that building has been cored. There’s nothing inside.”

  “That’s where she is.”

  Mix nodded, already turning away from him. Already, in some sense, finished. “Whatever you say.”

  3.

  She yanked him around, as close to panic as she’d been in weeks, and they walked briskly back in the direction they’d come. She wanted to run, but either he couldn’t or he wouldn’t. It wasn’t until he wrenched his wrist free of her grip, though, that she considered leaving him there. The animal inside her started to pace.

  He stood resolutely in place, rubbing the place she’d grabbed him. Behind him, in the dense gray air, the wagoneer still watched, its lidless eyes shedding a dim yellow light. The thin choir of dismembered bodies held their sustained note. She’d been glanced at before, but none had ever stopped and stared until now. She thought about the knife in her backpack. An affectation. So stupid. Unless she gutted this old man right here and ran while the things fell upon him instead.

  “Where are you going?” he said. He wasn’t even trying to be quiet anymore. His voice bounced down the empty street, came back at them like a strange reflection of itself.

  Out, she wanted to say. We’re getting out. But instead, she said, “We’ll go around. A detour. Hurry.” She wasn’t a dumb kid. She had a job. She would do it. She could handle this.

  “Okay,” he said, showing her a little deference for the first time. He joined her, even picking up his pace. “I thought you were going to leave me.”

  “Fuck you, I’m not leaving.” She could hear the tears in her voice and she hated herself for it. Stupid girl. That’s what they called her. They were right all along.

  They doubled back, turned a corner, pursuing a longer route to the address. Mix glanced behind her often, sure they were being followed, but the wagoneer was nowhere to be seen.

  The streets had continued to transform since last she’d been here. The wagoneers hauled their cartloads of human remains, coming from some central location and depositing them in moldering piles throughout Hollow City, where the surgeons continued to stitch them together into grotesque, seemingly meaningless configurations: there were more torsos like the ones they had just seen strung like bunting from one side of the street to the other, each one tuned to a different pitch; great kites of skin flapped tautly in similar fashion, punched through with holes of varying sizes and patterns, as though a kind of Morse code had been pierced into them with an awl; skeletal structures made from the combined parts of a hundred rendered people loomed between the buildings in great, stilled wheels, fitting together like cogs in some grotesque engine. The bone wheels had been hastily assembled, still wet with blood and dripping with rags of meat. The eyes of the workers boiled with furnace-light as they toiled, and the air grew steadily colder.

  Mix stopped, hugging the corner of what had once been a 24-hour drug store. Blood splashed the interior of the picture window now, obscuring whatever was inside. She plotted their course in her head, and realized with a buckle of disbelief that the address they were going to—the building she knew from reports of the others had been cored from the inside—seemed to be the center of the wagoneers’ activity.

  If Carlos was impatient with her stopping, he gave no sign. He was leaning against the wall too, breathing heavily. His eyes were unfocused, and she wondered how much of this he was taking in.

  “You still alive back there?” she said.

  “I think so. Hard to tell anymore.” He made a vague gesture. “What is all this?”

  “Shit, you’re asking me? It’s just another bad dream, I guess. You’re the one with all the life experience, you ought to recognize one by now.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “So, you seen enough now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She pointed ahead, to where his old apartment building hulked into the sky a little over a block away. The desiccated bodies of the wagoneers came and went from inside with a clockwork regularity. “There’s no one left in there, old man. That’s fucking grand central station.”

  “No. She’s in there.”

  For a moment, Mix couldn’t speak through the rage. The degree of obliviousness he was displaying, the absolute blind faith in an impossible outcome, had just crossed the border from desperate hope to outright derangement. He was crazy, probably had been for some time, and now he was going to get them both killed. Or worse than killed. The thing inside her paced and growled. She was ready to let it out at last.

  She felt a curious dread about it. Not at his fate—he’d bought that for himself—but at the simple act of walking away, and at the border she would be crossing within herself by doing it. It was one she had always taken pride in being ready to cross, but now that the moment had come, she was afraid of it, and afraid of the world that waited for her on the other side. She pressed her forehead against the wall, closed her eyes, and listened to the strange sounds the new architectures of flesh created around her: the gorgeous notes, the flag-like snapping, the hollow tone of bones clattering in the wind. It reminded her of the various instruments in her school band tuning themselves before a concert. She heard him breathing beside her, too, heavily and quickly, as he expended what she knew were his final energies on this suicidal quest.

  “So who is she, anyway? Your wife? Your daughter?”

  “No. She’s my dog.”

  It was as though he said something in a foreign language. She needed a moment to translate it into something she could understand. When it happened, the last beleaguered rank of resistance inside her folded, and she started to laugh. It was quiet, almost despairing, and she couldn’t stop it. She pressed her face into the stone wall and laughed through her clenched teeth.

  The absurdity of it all.

  “She’s my dog,” Carlos said, a little defensively. “She’s my only friend. I’m going to bring her home.”

  “Your home is gone,” she said, the thin stream of giggles reaching its end, giving way instead to a huge sadness, the kind that did not seem to visit her but instead emerged from within, as much a part of her body as a liver or a spleen. She wanted to hate the old man but what she felt for him wasn’t hate. It was something complicated and awful and unknown to her, but hate was too simple a word to describe it. If she had ever loved a child still innocent of its first heartbreak, she might have known the feeling. But she wasn’t a parent; and anyway, she couldn’t remember love.

  “A dog,” she said.

  Carlos stood beside her, the aesthetic of Hell manifested around him, an abyssal acoustic being built by its wretched servants, and he looked like what he was: a slumped, fading old man, lonely in the world but for one simple animal, and fully aware of the impossibility of retrieving it. His speech was defiant but his mind had already recognized the truth, and she could see it erode him even as she watched, like a sand dune in a
strong wind.

  Somewhere in this bloody tangle of bone and flesh, maybe even some still-muttering faces affixed to a wall with an unguent excreted from the lungs of the surgeons, were her parents, their cold anger still seeping from their tongues, their self-loathing and their resentment still animating the flayed muscles in their peeled faces. She could hear them as clearly as ever.

  Stupid girl.

  God damn them anyway.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go get your dog.”

  4.

  The girl was careful, but there was no need to sneak. What could they do to him? Death wasn’t shit. Carlos knew he should tell her to leave—it was obvious he wasn’t going to be coming back, with or without Maria—but it was her choice to make. Life was long or short, and it meant something or it didn’t. It wasn’t his business to tell her how to measure hers.

  The walls of his old apartment building bowed slightly, as though some great pressure grew from within. The doors had been torn off and the windows broken, though, and he could see nothing inside but shadow. Pacing the perimeter of the building were three dark-robed figures, their heads encased in black iron boxes. They exuded a monastic patience, moving slowly and with obvious precision. The lead figure held an open book in his left hand, scribbling busily into it with his right. The one in the middle swung a censer, a black orb from which spilled a heavy yellow smoke. The scent of marigolds carried over to him. The figure in the back held aloft a severed head on a pole, which emitted a beam of light from its wrenched mouth.

  Carlos waited for these figures to pass before approaching the doors as casually as if he belonged there. Mix made a sound of protest, but he ignored her. A surgeon emerged from the doors just as he reached them, stooping low to fit, but though it cast him a curious glance, it did not interfere with him, or even break its stride. It stretched itself to its full height and walked away, thin hands trailing long needles of bone and bloody thread. It moved slowly and languidly, like something walking underwater.