III
Omarion Cake’s blood runs through the streets of Cincinnati. As Ohio’s district attorney I’m helping to clean up the spill. The who and wherefores always end up being distilled down to the same cluster of newspaper headlines:
UNARMED BLACK TEEN SHOT TO DEATH BY POLICE OFFICERS
I step into my eighth-floor corner office awaited by the Haves: a Hamilton County commissioner, the county sheriff, the mayor and my ADA. The Have Nots, Cake’s family, civil rights hawks, beleaguered protestors—locals and out-of-towners—will get a separate meeting, one to encourage calm and patience and tease the prospects of accountability and justice.
Cake’s sordid history with the demon weed marijuana and a juvenile record that was never expunged has already inflamed both sides.
“Second fatal altercation in this city in eight months. Fourth death by cop in two years. Election year for the mayor,” I’m told.
We hunch around my beautiful polished oak desk like we’re varsity starters in a huddle. And we’re a multicultural lot: the sheriff and my ADA are white; the commish is Hispanic; the mayor’s black, like me. There always has to be sides, and one side has to win. The mayor looks to me. Everyone knows whose call this is.
“It’s all of us, or it’s a no-go,” he says. “You understand?”
I’m a learned man. I understand. My power is divisible by 3: privilege of my occupation, privilege of my income, privilege of my gender. Having pocketsful of privileges takes the edge off, but it’s never been fun, only ball-breaking relationship-sacrificing work to get here. If the adage says my race works twice as hard to be seen as half as good by white folks, well, I work five times as hard to be seen as superior. But now Omarion Cake, fatherless and flunking out of his last-chance high school, in death holds a power equal mine.
My momma, God rest her soul, lived to see my success, if not my disgrace. Do I hold ill will toward a 15-year-old unarmed black boy whose amber-colored eyes were blown out from a gunshot to the back of the head? Fifteen-year-old Mr. Cake, who never met me, could never conceive how hard I worked in high school and law school and in life, now holds in his cold, dead 15-year-old hands my future.
“I understand,” I say.
IV
It should have been nearly impossible to find the field again. No phantom billboard to guide me this time. In truth I’ve been here in reflective thought so many times over the years I wonder if I ever left this place. Its expanse and contours have outlasted my fluency with catechism, my parents, two marriages and a child.
I was a smart-ass college student when I found it, a retired jurist as I return to it, a life looking over my shoulders in between. I am an old black man, aided by cane, with a heart subsisting on super-pills and jumpstarts from a pacemaker.
I twist myself out of my car and hobble down the dirt road to a place as faint and familiar as my childhood scars. The field seems larger, with more rows of ebony babies than years before. Of course there are more.
Kneeling to the closest child, I reach out to touch his tiny big toe. He is a 49-year-old Texas man wrapped in a chain and dragged for three miles by a pickup truck. To my left I press my palm to a child’s cool indigo forehead. She is a stripper who committed suicide months after being gang-raped at a bachelor party. I stumble deeper into the field and take a plumb-size fist in my hands. He is shot at age seventeen for playing his hip hop music too loud in a car in Florida. I rub the smooth, heaving caramel chest of a baby boy. He is strangled by a police officer while being arrested for selling cigarettes outside a beauty supply store in New York. I brush away cradle cap flakes from a tiny little head. She is nineteen and shot in the face on the porch of a Detroit man whose help she is seeking after crashing her car. The next is a boy who drowns with his mother after she jumps from a slave ship with him tightly in her arms. The next is a victim of a drive-by shooting. And then, a 12-year-old Alabama girl with seven fingers on each hand is sold to a pedophile slave owner. And then, a young man is lynched along with two others at a public hanging. A girl is blown up with her friends in their church’s basement.
My arthritic fingers dig into hard, dry dirt until softer soil beneath clumps under my fingernails. I won’t seek out the half-dozen I know. I scan the darkened field, but I won’t look too hard or too long. I won’t find the baby with honey-colored eyes who never knew his father and didn’t make it through high school. I have to believe these last ten years have been lived by me in the best ways I could. I like to think that after I reached the pinnacle of my professional career—a state supreme court judge—I reached the pinnacle of my compassion. I get dizzy and lose balance. I collapse to my stomach, pinning my cane beneath me. Despite the soft grass my ancient bones wail. I roll onto my back and look skyward to a soaring crow, or a bat, wondering if the scope of this field can be seen from up there.
A field of weeping tar.
The tank’s on empty. I yearn to believe there is more ahead for me. But my future, once somewhere down a ceaseless winding road, is finally before me, on a path narrowed from vast crisscrossing highways and avenues to a single dirt road to this place, ending at a plot of land that beckons us each. I was damn fool enough to stop pretending not to see it and drove right up to it.
There was a time when I was so sure that man could make the span of roads endless, that lead anywhere and everywhere. I know surely that man makes hard roads that eventually run out at the end of the world. And this field. Man makes this field too.
<<====>>
AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE
I do my best thinking in my car while I’m driving alone.
After being asked to contribute a Halloween-themed story to a magazine I decide I’ll construct it around a road trip. My idea is to create a chilling tale that basically takes place within the car. Quickly the story veers off the main road, as they often do, and takes me down another path. It isn’t simply about the journey anymore, it’s about the destination. I think about all these anonymous fields whipping pass the car window and my story gains bones.
This is a season of political strife and social unrest, and these concerns worm their way into the tale. My story gains blood.
Finally, the story can’t be read, it has to be told. Once I establish a first-person voice, my story gains flesh.
The rest, I guess, is just driving right up to the field.
A FACE IN THE CROWD
TIM WAGGONER
From 44 Lies by 22 Liars
Editor: Eric Beebe
Publisher: Post Mortem Press
______
She can’t breathe, can’t move. She’s surrounded by other people, all of them naked, just as she is, all of them packed so tightly together that she can’t tell where their bodies end and hers begins.
Her heart pounds and sweat beads on her skin. She wonders what would happen if her heart gave out and she died like this. Would her body go limp and eventually slip to the grated floor? Or would she remain upright, held in place by the still-living bodies of those pressed against her? It’s how everyone here sleeps, after all. If she does die, she wonders if anyone will notice. Probably not until I start to stink, she decides.
Everyone can’t inhale and exhale at the same time. There’s simply not enough room for people’s chests to all expand at once. They have to alternate. As one starts to breathe out, another breathes in. You have to relax and let it happen. Empty your mind, not think of anything, for even the slightest distraction can disrupt your part in the rhythm, and when you fall out of sync, it affects everyone else. Great ripples of uneven breathing spread outward in all directions, resulting in thousands, maybe millions of people gasping and panicking, pressing uselessly against one another as their bodies seek escape. The woman has experienced these mass panics before, and she’s determined not to be the cause of another.
She closes her eyes—not much to see anyway, other than the back of the head in front of her—and does her best to think of nothing. Her panic subsides, and she’s once again able
to take shallow breaths. She can’t draw in much air, but it’s enough to steady her nerves.
After a while, she opens her eyes, gazes upon the short black hair belonging to the man in front of her. The tip of her nose touches his neck, her breasts press against his back, and her pubis is jammed to his buttocks. There’s nothing remotely sexual about any of this, at least not to her.
She can turn her head from side to side, but she doesn’t like to. The people in the crowd aren’t arranged in neat, orderly lines. To her left is an old man, and when she turns his way, she sees his ear, which is liver-spotted and has a tuft of white hair growing out of it. To her right, another woman faces her. Whenever she looks at the other woman, the woman smiles and tries to talk. But the other woman long ago forgot how to make words, and all that comes out of her mouth are inarticulate grunts and moans. So mostly she keeps her gaze fixed on the black hair in front of her. After all this time, she’s gotten used to it, and sometimes she imagines she’s gazing into a starless night sky, or that she’s in a cave deep beneath the surface of the earth, a place so far down that no light has ever reached there. And in that cave she’s wonderfully, blessedly alone.
One thing she hasn’t gotten used to is the smell. At certain intervals, a rain of thin gruel falls from above. It lasts only a few moments, and people have to do their best to tilt their heads back, catch what they can in their mouths, and swallow it down before the rain ends. The residue coats everyone’s skin, and it leaves a sour smell like spoiled milk. People piss and shit, too, and what little they excrete falls through the grate below. But no one can clean themselves afterward, which adds to the smell. Thousands of stinking bodies, thousands upon thousands, create an unbearably thick miasma so rank that she can only bear to breathe through her mouth.
She spends her waking hours listening, waiting—for the sound. She has no way to accurately gauge the passage of time, so she doesn’t know how often it comes, and she can’t remember the last time she heard it. But now, over the susurration of thousands of people breathing, she thinks … Yes, she hears it! The others do too, and their muscles grow tense, and their breathing becomes erratic with excitement. It’s time.
A metallic sound, a chink-chink-chink-chink, as of ratcheting machinery. Soft at first, but growing louder—and closer—with each passing second. There’s a shadowy dim light in this place, and as she looks up, she can make out the hazy forms of objects descending from above. Three-pronged claws dangling from chains, dozens of them, and as they draw closer, the prongs slowly spread open. Please, she thinks. Please, please, please …
The claws stop for an instant, teasing almost, and then plunge the final few feet. Prongs fasten on heads, necks, shoulders, needle tips piercing flesh, digging deep. Blood flows, people scream, and then the claws retract, pulling their prizes from the crowd, lifting them up into the shadows, and away. Blood drips for a few moments, falling like warm red rain, and then it stops.
For a short time, there’s a bit of space to breathe, even move, but it doesn’t last long. Soon they are pressed close together again, packed tight once more, and that’s when the sobbing begins.
The woman sobs too. She was not taken. But the woman next to her was, the one that could no longer talk. The lucky bitch. She caught a glimpse of the other woman’s face as she was lifted away, and although she was screaming in agony, she was smiling, too. Someday the woman left behind hopes to know that pain, that bliss. Next time, she tells herself, as tears slide down her cheeks.
Next time.
<<====>>
AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE
When I write horror, I don’t make distinctions between different types. “Quiet,” “weird,” “hardcore,” “psychological,” “surreal,” etc. are all different colors on my palette, and I use them whenever I need them. Horror should never be safe—for either readers or writers—and if you limit yourself to one technique in a story, readers quickly figure out that this is a “quiet” story or an “extreme” story, and whatever happens from that point on is expected. But if you mix things up and blend different techniques in your horror fiction, readers are kept off balance. They can’t anticipate what will happen next, which puts readers in the same position as your characters, and what could be less safe than that? That’s what I tried to do with “A Face in the Crowd,” and hopefully, I succeeded.
REDUX
ALEXANDRA RENWICK
From Murder Mayhem Short Stories (Gothic Fantasy)
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
______
Winnie raised herself up on one elbow and squinted in the direction of her bedroom doorway. The room was so dark it was like staring at a sheet of solid tar. The sound came again, a whisper of fabric followed by a nearly inaudible intake of breath. She saw a silhouette move, personsized, personshaped, a darker patch of darkness, and her still half asleep brain struggled to make sense of what was happening. She fumbled with the lamp, clicked it on, saw the person standing in the doorway, and though she began to ask Peter, is that you? with all the confusion, the lack of comprehension, the slow lickings of the dawning understanding of danger, her lips barely compressed into the first letter of his name before he raised the gun he held and shot her twice in the center of the chest.
Winnie raised herself up on one elbow and squinted in the direction of her bedroom doorway, dislodging the book she’d fallen asleep reading. It slid off the vintage satin coverlet to the floor with a crash.
She reached down to rescue the book, to smooth its fresh-bent pages and close it properly, when an odd sensation of extra stillness made her pause.
She glanced again at the doorway leading to the hall. Had something flickered there, in the blackness? She clicked the bedside lamp on and squinted at the pitch-dark rectangle of the open door.
“Hello?” she called out, her voice sounding feeble, wobbly. She felt instantly foolish. Stupid. Embarrassed, even alone with no one to witness her being all squirrelly and girly and scared.
Shaking her head, she got up to head for the bathroom. She stepped into her slippers—puffy ridiculous moonfaced panda slippers, a gift from her mother last Christmas—and grabbed her garish pink and purple chrysanthemum kimono off its hook by the door, shrugging into it more from habit than a need for warmth or modesty in the empty house. As soon as she stepped into the hallway a hammer smashed into her left temple.
With a soft startled cry she fell sideways, knocking a framed picture off the wall. Glass crunched and tinkled as she crawled over it. Her head felt hot, but the alarm bells going off in her brain drowned out any immediate sensation of pain. Warm sticky wetness trickled into her left ear. Her palms trailed red smears on the wall as she pulled herself upright and turned to see her neighbor Peter standing with a bloody hammer in his hand. Weak light spilled from her bedroom, casting his face half in shadow. A weirdly rounded cap perched on his short blonde hair, like a compact bike helmet with a too-thin strap running under his chin. There was not an ounce of any emotion she could understand or even recognize as he lifted his arm again to send the hammer crashing down into her skull.
Winnie raised herself up on one elbow and squinted in the direction of her bedroom doorway. Had something woken her? She’d been dreaming about her mother. Her mother turning into a goldfish the size of a city bus and swimming down the street, obeying traffic laws with other vehicles half her size.
Shit, it must be late. Winnie rolled to the far edge of the bed—a bed too big, now she and Liz had split for good—and grabbed her phone off what used to be Liz’s nightstand. 2:22 a.m. A nice solid number, but way too early to wake up.
Rustling in the hallway. Not her imagination.
Silent, phone in hand, she slithered off the coverlet onto the floor. Her naked skin hardly made a whisper on the vintage satin. She pressed the cold flat glass face of the phone hard between her breasts, trying to cover any lights it might emit, hoping she could keep it from making inadvertent sounds. She thought she heard breathing in the hallway just ou
tside her bedroom door—not labored breathing, but tight, irregular, excited but as though the breather fought to keep it under control.
With some wriggling Winnie managed to squeeze mostly under the bed. It was disgusting under there, grittily colonized with dust creatures the size of kittens—neither she nor Liz had been vacuum-under-the-bed types. Even in the dark she could see the lower legs of someone entering the room. The person attached to the legs approached the bed, not seeming particularly stealthful and certainly without the hesitancy Winnie would expect of anyone unaccustomed to navigating her bedroom at night without light. Whoever it was even sidestepped her ridiculous slippers where they lay as they’d fallen when she’d kicked them off going to bed, one humped up onto the other’s back as though intending to populate her room with plush moonfaced panda babies.
She held her breath as the person stood beside the bed. Her heart beat too fast, slamming against the flat face of her phone, the sound reverberating so loudly she was sure it echoed up into the room, giving her away.
“Winnie? Where are you?”
Winnie’s heart skipped its next beat as she recognized the voice. Peter, from next door. Why the hell would he be in her room in the middle of the night? Had softhearted Liz extended him an open-ended invitation to drop in that she’d neglected to mention? Or maybe Winnie herself had once made some offhand neighborly comment about him being welcome anytime—something no sane person would take so literally? Maybe he was in trouble, hurt or bleeding from some freak kitchen accident, desperate for his only nearby neighbor to drive him to the hospital. A dozen implausible notions scrambled to present themselves as plausible scenarios, to explain away the intense weirdness of a neighbor she barely knew being her in her bedroom uninvited after two in the morning.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Page 11
