Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  “My granddad stole it,” she said, lying through her teeth. “He’s real sorry; gone away for a bit. A pilgrimage or some such bloody thing. Said I should mind the shop for him.”

  “Your grandfather,” said the Lady of the Scales, taking the goldfish and decanting it from chamber pot to tank. “No-one’s going to believe that, child.”

  Alix let herself rest on the side of the open door, too dizzy to stand straight and with her own blood slicked down her, skin from a drowning man under her fingers. “I brought your fish back,” she said, trying not to cry and the Lady sighed.

  “They’ll believe me,” she said. “I suppose he came to apologise himself. For the bad example he set to kin. I promised to keep an eye on his estranged … grandchild, was it?”

  “It’ll do,” said Alix, sniffling, and reaching up one red hand to wipe away warm snot.

  “It’s the risk they take,” said the Lady of Scales, and drew her in for bandaging and breakfast.

  It was a good breakfast, but Alix learned to cook better. While her slices healed up Perette hauled in the fins of the shark shop, stacked them in the back where they’d be out of the way until needed for bait, and scrubbed until it shone clean enough for cauldrons.

  “I feel bad, still, about eating them,” Alix said, of the crabs that found their way to the pot. “Isn’t a bit of soul still a soul?”

  “Souls are only good for vengeance, far as I can tell,” said Perette, standing over the pot and stirring before the lunch crowd came in. “They might have let you go for the fin-man, but there are still kids getting munched.”

  Alix wasn’t a diver anymore, and Perette had stopped her fishing nights as well. They still heard the cries and crunching, and if they still heard the calling down from people with too much coin and too little … well. It wasn’t as if Alix never tossed things down herself. The shop was enough to keep the two of them with only a tiny bit left over, and she might have left the rest of the kids behind but they still had to eat.

  She never said it, though. At least not to them.

  “We need more meat for tomorrow,” said Perette. “You want to do it or shall I?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Alix, making for the trap. She wasn’t as skinny as before, but Perette was still a bigger draw for customers, and seemed to mind their pinching less. Alix had no patience for it, not after the night under dock and the memory of claws all around.

  “Don’t call the crabs,” she sang, but crab-calling was easy enough with blood and flesh, and she had one and the shop the other. Palms pressed against the mussels beneath the trap, and it stung for only a moment, a slicing she was used to and her palms were tight with scars anyway, most of the feeling gone. Blood over the fins, the remains of kids she’d known and forgotten and Alix didn’t think they’d have grudged her, their skin folded over and lowered down on chains and she hoped that all their souls were gone, wherever they were, because the giant crabs that came back up, clinging to iron and gorging on child-skin were headed for nothing but an iron spike to the brain and cooking pots.

  “They’re so sweet,” said Perette, over the pot and stirring. She sang as she stirred—a kid song, a crab song, one that they’d learned early from diving—and didn’t cough anymore.

  Of course they were, Alix thought, remembering the falling caramel, the lumps of boiling sugar falling from above. The crabs were scavengers too.

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  “The Better Part of Drowning” was first published in The Dark, November 2017. It’s part of a series of stories I’m writing in the same setting, some of which have also appeared (or are coming soon) in Kaleidotrope and the Mother of Invention anthology from Twelfth Planet Press.

  Kids have a history of being used in dangerous labour. Whether they’re being sent down mineshafts or forced to dive for pearls and pennies or exploited for sex work, they have less opportunity to protect themselves than adults … and frequently, they have fewer options. “The Better Part of Drowning” is a story of a society of kids, literally living under the homes and housing of the adults. There’s a vertical hierarchy here, one with predators above and below. There’s also, for the kids, very little choice. It’s risk themselves or starve, and in a world defined by that risk they develop their own ways of managing, and their own means of enforcing order. They take the slivers of power they get and use them for survival—but surviving the monsters below, the monsters they become in order to live, gives tools as well as torture. And sooner or later, those kids are going to take those tools and start looking up, because the knives that work on crabs and children work on adults as well, and they are by far the most complicit.

  TIL DEATH

  TIM WAGGONER

  From Never Fear: The Apocalypse

  13Thirty Books LLC.

  Audrey pushed the shopping cart filled with metal odds and ends along the cracked sidewalk, her husband Edmund trailing behind her, struggling to keep up. Sweat beaded on her upper lip, despite the slight chill in the air. The temperature never varied in the World After, never grew colder, never grew warmer. But Audrey was seventy-three, and even though she worked every day and was in good shape for her age, pushing a full cart took it out of her. She had no idea how long she’d been working. Time didn’t operate the same way it had before the Masters’ arrival. There was no day or night now. The sky was a perpetually hazy sour yellow like diseased phlegm with no sun or moon ever visible. Audrey didn’t know if there even was a sun or moon anymore. For all she knew, the rest of the universe might’ve ceased to exist once the Masters came to Earth. Without day or night, Audrey had no sense of time. She could’ve gathered metal for five hours or fifty. There was no way to know. She only knew that she was tired all the way down to the bone.

  The thrall mark on her forehead hurt like a fresh sunburn, and her head pounded with a rhythm that almost felt like language.

  BRING, BRING …

  Maybe it was her Master’s voice, maybe it was her imagination. It didn’t matter. Either way, she had to make her delivery—so much depended on it. She stopped pushing the cart, released her grip on the handle, and turned around.

  Edmund, her senior by eight years, was twenty paces behind her on the sidewalk. He was naked, his parchment-thin skin drawn close to his old bones. His limbs had been rearranged, so he could only move by crab-walking backward, and his head was turned 180 degrees so he could see where he was going. Not that his cataract-covered eyes could see much. His sparse body hair was wiry and snow-white, but his head was bald. Instead of a beard, thick worm-like growths grew out of his chin and cheeks. The fleshy tendrils were tipped with oozing pustules, and Audrey thought of them as pimple-snakes. They writhed with independent life, and Audrey couldn’t look at them without nausea twisting her stomach. His mouth hung upon, jaw slack as if the muscles no longer functioned, and perpetual lines of drool ran from his mouth to moisten his pimple-snakes.

  He didn’t talk—or maybe he couldn’t. Either way, Audrey was grateful. She had no idea how his mind functioned these days, but whatever distorted thoughts might spark and sputter inside what remained of his mind, she was glad he couldn’t share them. He did make sounds from time to time: strange mournful hissings and tremulous bleats. His penis was always erect, so filled with blood it was purple-black, and a clear fluid that smelled like ammonia leaked from his ass. A line of the foul stuff trailed behind him on the sidewalk. In some ways, his body odor was the worst part. He stank like unwashed cock and balls that had been slathered in shit, and his breath was a sour-sweet reek that reminded her of rotting fruit.

  Edmund hadn’t always been like this, of course. Like so many things about the world, he’d changed since the advent of the Masters. So had she, just not outwardly.

  It took him a while to close half the distance between them, but when he had, he stopped, gazed at her with eyes dull and lifeless as glass marbles, and lowered himself to the sidewalk. Audrey gritted her teeth in frustration. She hated it when he
did this. She wanted to yell at him, shout that he should get his lazy ass moving, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. He understood so little these days. Not that he’d understood much in the last few years before he’d changed. She knew of only one way to get him going again, and while she was reluctant to do it, it was vital they made their delivery today … before she lost her nerve.

  She hesitated a moment, uncomfortable about leaving her shopping cart unattended. She’d worked hard to gather this much metal, and she didn’t want to risk another thrall stealing it while she was trying to coax Edmund to get moving. Then again, the longer she remained in one place, the more she risked being noticed by another thrall. Or by one of the deadly creatures that roamed the World After.

  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

  She once thought she’d understood that phrase, but she hadn’t known shit.

  She started walking toward Edmund.

  * * *

  In the first days after the Masters’ advent, and the remaking of the world, Audrey had often thought it a blessing that Edmund’s mind had been mostly devoured by dementia. He remembered her—more or less—but otherwise he wasn’t aware of much. In a way, she envied him. She wished she was insulated from the World After with a comforting blanket of mental oblivion.

  After the Arrival, she estimated they had remained in their home, doors locked and curtains drawn, for nine days before their supplies became dangerously low. Water was the biggest issue. Something still came out of the taps, but it was thick as tar, smelled like a mixture of cinnamon and turpentine, and had a corrosive effect on both metal and porcelain. She didn’t want to know what it could do to flesh. Their only food was one nearly empty container of oatmeal and a few boxes of pasta. But she had no water or electricity to prepare any of it.

  One evening—or perhaps morning, it was all the same now—she lay in bed, curtains closed so she wouldn’t have to look at the phlegm-colored sky outside … or at whatever hideous abomination might go lurching past. Edmund lay on the bed next to her, so motionless he might have been dead.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept, was certain that she wouldn’t drift off no matter how long she lay there, but sooner than she expected, her eyes closed and sleep took her. She hadn’t dreamed since the Masters’ arrival, but she did so now.

  In the dream, she stood on a patch of bare earth enclosed by a high wooden fence with barbed wire all around the top. The white paint on the fence was old and peeling, the wood beneath gray and weathered. Mounds of scrap metal were piled at the corners of the fence, each taller than she was. In the middle of the enclosure was an open pit, ten feet in diameter, she estimated, maybe fifteen. The edges were smooth, almost as if the pit was a natural structure, though the perfect roundness of it argued against that. She stood several feet away from the pit, but she still had a good view of the inside. All she could see was darkness, so black, so deep, so absolute, that it seemed to actually be absorbing light, pulling it into itself and swallowing it.

  Gazing into the pit caused unreasoning atavistic fear to well within her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think, could only stand and watch, heart pounding rapidly in her chest like a small bird caught by a predator’s mesmeric gaze.

  She heard the Master’s wordless voice for the first time then. It asked her a question, offered her payment for her service—unquestioning, unwavering. She spoke a single word in reply.

  “Yes.”

  Fiery pain seared her forehead then, as if an invisible branding iron had been pressed to her flesh, and she screamed herself awake. Edmund woke too, confused and frightened. He began to shout and then to cry, and Audrey held him for a time, comforting him while her forehead pulsed with pain. When Edmund fell back to sleep, she took a flashlight from her nightstand, went into the master bathroom, looked into the mirror over the sink, shone the beam on her forehead, and saw her thrall mark for the first time. Along with the mark came knowledge: the location of the Master’s lair and what was expected of her. The Master wanted her to get to work immediately, for it hungered. There was just one problem, one that she hadn’t considered in her dream.

  She fixed her gaze on the thrall mark’s reflection, as if by addressing it she could communicate with her new Master. “I can’t leave Edmund alone for long. He’s not strong enough to work, and his mind …” She trailed off, uncertain how best to explain it. But before she could speak again, she heard Edmund scream, a high-pitched shriek so intense it sounded as if he were tearing his throat to shreds.

  She dropped the flashlight and ran back into the bedroom. Edmund writhed on the bed as his body reformed itself, bones breaking and resetting into new configurations. The transformation wasn’t swift and it only became more painful as it continued, but when it was finished, Edmund had become a monstrously twisted thing, a creature strong enough to accompany Audrey while she worked. Her Master had done this somehow, she realized, in order to help her. It was, to the Master’s alien mind, an act of kindness and generosity.

  Audrey swallowed her rising gorge and forced herself to whisper, “Thank you,” all the while unable to take her gaze off the horrible thing her husband had become.

  * * *

  The Masters had come from elsewhere. Space, another dimension, a different time … no one knew for certain. Some believed the Masters had ruled Earth in the far distant past, perhaps even created it to be their plaything—or feeding ground—and long ago they’d left Earth for unknown reasons, but now had returned to reclaim what was theirs. They had no individual names—at least, none that humans were aware of—and no one had ever seen a Master. No one who’d ever lived to tell about it, anyway. Most believed they possessed no physical form, not as humans understood the concept. They lived in separate lairs and worked through thralls and monstrous servants of their own creation. Thralls were rewarded for their service with food, clean water, and electricity in their homes, and while wearing a thrall mark didn’t protect you from every danger in the World After, it usually gave predators—both those human and those not—pause.

  A thrall’s main purpose was to feed his or her Master. Sometimes this meant capturing other humans and bringing them—kicking and screaming, if need be—to the Master’s lair. But Masters didn’t always feed on human flesh. From other thralls, Audrey had learned of Masters that fed on blood, human waste, and specific organs such as pancreas. Some fed on inorganic objects such as used clothing, books, electronic devices, CD’s, and DVD’s. Some dined on more abstract fare: people’s memories, emotions, or fantasies. All Audrey’s Master required was metal. Any kind would do, although it was particularly fond of copper. Audrey had no idea exactly what happened to the metal after she threw it into the pit that served as her Master’s lair, but she’d never heard it hit bottom.

  Even though their Master gave them food and water—somehow made it materialize right in their home—Audrey was thin to the point of emaciation, as was Edmund. Masters might reward thralls for their service, but they were far from generous. They gave just enough for their servants to remain alive, and not a scrap more. And for this, thralls risked their lives day after day. But what else could they do? It was the only game in town.

  * * *

  In the World Before, Audrey’s therapist had warned her about something called compassion fatigue.

  It happens to long-term caregivers, she’d said. Especially those whose loved ones suffer from conditions like dementia, which only worsen over time. You become emotionally exhausted, and—if you’re not careful—that exhaustion can turn into feelings of resentment. Even hatred.

  That hadn’t happened to Audrey. Not before, anyway. But now? Now it was hard to think of the loathsome thing that followed her around like some freakish dog as the man who had been her husband. She wanted to be free of Edmund as much, if not more, as she wanted him to be free of the nightmarish existence she’d inadvertently cursed him with.

  The first time she’d tried to kill Edmund, she’d done it during a
scavenging run, when she’d been picking through the ruins of a downtown office building. She didn’t know what had caused the building’s collapse. There was no sign of fire, no sign that something had struck the building. No wood rot, no crumbling concrete, no fatigued metal. It looked as if the pieces of the building had simply detached from one another and fallen into a jumbled heap. Edmund stayed away from the debris, guarding the shopping cart and watching as she walked through the odds and ends, searching for choice bits of metal. If anyone—or anything—came near, he’d let out a loud hissing sound. She had no idea if this was a conscious warning on his part or merely an instinctive reaction. Either way, his warnings came in handy.

  As she searched among the debris, she came across large shards of glass, pieces of a window that had been broken in the building’s collapse. A couple of shards were the right size to hold in one hand, and one of those was the basic size and shape of a butcher knife blade. She gazed at the glass knife for a long time before finally crouching down to pick it up. She gripped it like a knife, carefully not to squeeze too hard so she wouldn’t cut her hand. She was surprised by how heavy it felt, almost as if it were a real blade instead of merely a piece of broken glass. She gingerly touched the finger of her free hand to the pointed tip, then ran it along one of the shard’s edges, again careful not to press too hard.

  After a time, she stood, turned, and began making her way toward Edmund.

  He watched her approach, no awareness showing in his milky eyes. His erection bounced several times, like he was a dog wagging its tail upon his master’s return. He didn’t react when she knelt next to his head. Didn’t flinch when she touched the glass shard to his throat. Didn’t do more than let out a soft hiss of air—was there a hint of surprise in that breath?—as she drew the shard across his neck, the sharp edge parting flesh and severing veins and arteries, bringing forth a gushing flood of crimson.

  He turned to look at her then, blood dribbling past his lips onto his pimple-snakes. No expression, no recognition. And then he slumped to the ground and continued to bleed out.