There are footsteps from the corridor outside. Is it Sergeant? Has he come back to dismantle her? To take her to the altar and give her to the goddess Artemis?
Someone unlocks Melanie’s door, and pushes it open.
Miss Mailer stands in the doorway. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m here.”
Melanie surges to her feet, her heart almost bursting with happiness and relief. She’s going to run to Miss Mailer. She’s going to hug her and be hugged by her and be touching her not just with her hair but with her hands and her face and her whole body. Then she freezes where she is.
Her jaw muscles stiffen, and a moan comes out of her mouth.
Miss Mailer is alarmed. “Melanie?” She takes a step forward.
“Don’t!” Melanie screams. “Please, Miss Mailer! Don’t! Don’t touch me!”
Miss Mailer stops moving, but she’s so close! So close! Melanie whimpers. Her whole mind is exploding. She drops to her knees, then falls full-length on the floor. The smell, the wonderful, terrible smell, fills all the room and all her mind and all her thoughts, and all she wants to do is . . .
“Go away!” she moans. “Go away go away go away!” Miss Mailer doesn’t move.
“Fuck off, or I will dismantle you!” Melanie wails. She’s desperate.
Her mouth is filled with thick saliva like mud from a mudslide. She’s dangling on the end of the thinnest, thinnest piece of string. She’s going to fall and there’s only one direction to fall in.
“Oh God!” Miss Mailer blurts. She gets it at last. She rummages in her bag, which Melanie didn’t even notice until now. She takes something out—a tiny bottle with yellow liquid in it—and starts to spray it on her skin, on her clothes, in the air. The bottle says Dior. It’s not the usual chemical: it’s something that smells sweet and funny. Miss Mailer doesn’t stop until she’s emptied the bottle.
“Does that help?” she asks, with a catch in her voice. “Oh baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think . . . ”
It does help, a little. And Melanie has had practice at pushing the hunger down: she has to do it a little bit every time she picks up her book.
This is a million times harder, but after a while she can think again and move again and even sit up.
“It’s safe now,” she says timidly, groggily. And she remembers her own words, spoken as a joke so many times before she ever guessed what they might actually mean. “I won’t bite.”
Miss Mailer bends down and sweeps Melanie up, choking out her name, and there they are crying into each other’s tears, and even though the hunger is bending Melanie’s spine like Achilles bending his bow, she wouldn’t exchange this moment for all the other moments of her life.
“They’re attacking the fence,” Miss Mailer says, her voice muffled by Melanie’s hair. “But it’s not Hungries, it’s looters. Bandits. People just like me and the other teachers, but renegades who never went into the western cordon. We’ve got to get out before they break through. We’re being evacuated, Melanie—to Texas.”
“Why?” is all Melanie can think of to say.
“Because that’s where the cure is!” sobs Miss Mailer. “They’ll make you okay again, and you’ll have a real mom and dad, and a real life, and all this fucking madness will just be a memory!”
“No,” Melanie whimpers.
“Yes, baby! Yes!” Miss Mailer is hugging her tight, and Melanie is trying to find the words to explain that she doesn’t want a mom or a dad, she wants to stay here in the block with Miss Mailer and have lessons with her forever, but right then is when Sergeant walks into the cell.
Three of his people are behind him. His face is pale, and his eyes are open too wide.
“We got to go,” he says. “Right now. Last two choppers are loaded up and ready. I’m real sorry, Gwen, but this is the last call.”
“I’m not going without her,” Miss Mailer says, and she hugs Melanie so tight it almost hurts.
“Yeah,” Sergeant says. “You are. She can’t come on the transport without restraints, and we don’t got any restraints that we can use. You come on, now.”
He reaches out his hand as if he’s going to help Miss Mailer to her feet. Miss Mailer doesn’t take the hand.
“Come on, now,” Sergeant says again, on a rising pitch.
“I’m not leaving her,” Miss Mailer says again.
“She’s got no—”
Miss Mailer’s voice rises over Sergeant’s voice, shouts him into silence. “She doesn’t have any restraints because you kicked her chair into scrap metal. And now you’re going to leave her here, to the mercy of those animals, and say it was out of your hands. Well damn you, Eddie!” She can hardly get the words out; she sounds like there’s no breath left in her body. “Damn—fuck—rot what’s left of your miserable fucking heart!”
“I’ve got to go by the rules,” Sergeant pleads. His voice is weak, lost.
“Really?” Miss Mailer shouts at him. “The rules? And when you’ve ripped her heart out and fed it to your limp-dick fucking rules, you think that will bring Chloe back, or Sarah? Or bring you one moment’s peace? There’s a cure, you bastard! They can cure her! They can give her a normal life! You want to say she stays here and rots in the dark instead because you threw a man-tantrum and busted up her fucking chair?”
There’s a silence that seems like it’s never going to end. Maybe it never would, if there was only Sergeant and Miss Mailer and Melanie in the room: but one of Sergeant’s people breaks it at last. “Sarge, we’re already two minutes past the—”
“Shut up,” Sergeant tells him. And then to Miss Mailer he says, “You carry her. You hold her, every second of the way. And you’re responsible for her. If she bites anyone, I’m throwing you both off the transport.”
Miss Mailer stands up with Melanie cradled in her arms, and they run. They go out through the steel door. There are stairs on the other side of it that go up and up, a long way. Miss Mailer is holding her tight, but she rocks and bounces all the same, pressed up against Miss Mailer’s heart. Miss Mailer’s heart bumps rhythmically, as if something was alive inside it and touching Melanie’s cheek through her skin.
At the top of the stairs, there’s another door. They come out into sudden cold and blinding light. The quality of the sound changes, the echoes dying suddenly. Air moves against Melanie’s bare arm. Distant voices bray, almost drowned out by a mighty, droning, flickering roar.
The lights are moving, swinging around. Where they touch, details leap out of the darkness as though they’ve just been painted there. Men are running, stopping, running again, firing guns like Sergeant’s gun into the wild, jangling dark.
“Go!” Sergeant shouts.
Sergeant’s men run, and Miss Mailer runs. Sergeant runs behind them, his gun in his hand. “Don’t waste rounds,” Sergeant calls out to his people. “Pick your target.” He fires his gun, and his people fire, too, and the guns make a sound so loud it runs all the way out into the dark and then comes back again, but Melanie can’t see what it is they’re firing at or if they hit it. She’s got other stuff to worry about, anyway.
This close up, the smelly stuff that Miss Mailer sprayed on herself isn’t strong enough to hide the Miss Mailer smell underneath. The hunger is rising again inside Melanie, filling her up all the way to the top, taking her over: Miss Mailer’s arm is right there beside her head, and she’s thinking please don’t please don’t please don’t but who is she pleading with? There’s no one. No one but her.
A shape looms in the darkness: a thing as big as a room, that sits on the ground but rocks from side to side and spits dirt in their faces with its deep, dry breath and drones to itself like a giant trying to sing. It has a door in its side; some of the children sit there, inside the thing, in their chairs, tied in with straps and webbing so it looks like a big spider has caught them. Some of Sergeant’s people are there, too, shouting words that Melanie can’t hear. One of them slaps the side of the big thing: it lifts into the
air, all at once, and then it’s gone.
Sergeant’s arm clamps down on Miss Mailer’s shoulder and he turns her around, bodily. “There!” he shouts. “That way!” And they’re running again, but now it’s just Sergeant and Miss Mailer. Melanie doesn’t know where Sergeant’s people have gone.
There’s another one of the big rocking things, a long way away: a helicopter, Melanie thinks, the word coming to her from a lesson she doesn’t even remember. And that means they’re outside, under the sky, not in a big room like she thought at first. But even the astonishment is dulled by the gnawing, insistent hunger: her jaws are drawing back, straining open like the hinges of a door; her own thoughts are coming to her from a long way away, like someone shouting at her through a tiny mesh window: Oh please don’t please don’t!
Miss Mailer is running toward the helicopter and Sergeant is right behind. They’re close to it now, but one of the big swinging lights turns and shows them some men running toward them on a shallow angle.
The men don’t have guns like Sergeant does, but they have sticks and knives and one of them is waving a spear.
Sergeant fires, and nothing seems to happen. He fires again, and the man with the spear falls. Then they’re at the helicopter and Miss Mailer is pulled inside by a woman who seems startled and scared to see Melanie there.
“What the fuck?” she says.
“Sergeant Robertson’s orders!” Miss Mailer yells.
Some more of the children are here. Melanie sees Anne and Kenny and Lizzie in a single flash of one of the swinging lights. But now there’s a shout and Sergeant is fighting with somebody, right there at the door where they just climbed in. The men with the knives and the sticks have gotten there, too. and the sticks have gotten there, too.
Sergeant gets off one more shot, and all of a sudden one of the men doesn’t have a head anymore. He falls down out of sight. Another man knocks the gun out of Sergeant’s hand, but Sergeant takes his knife from him somehow and sticks it into the man’s stomach.
The woman inside the copter slaps the ceiling and points up—for the pilot, Melanie realizes. He’s sitting in his cockpit, fighting to keep the copter more or less level and more or less still, as though the ground is bucking under him and trying to throw him off. But it’s not the ground, it’s the weight of the men swarming on board.
“Shit!” the woman moans.
Miss Mailer hides Melanie’s eyes with her hand, but Melanie pushes the hand away. She knows what she has to do, now. It’s not even a hard choice, because the incredible, irresistible human flesh smell is helping her, pushing her in the direction she has to go.
She stops pleading with the hunger to leave her alone; it’s not listening anyway. She says to it, She stops pleading with the hunger to leave her alone; it’s not listening anyway. She says to it, instead, like Sergeant said to his people, Pick your target.
And then she jumps clear out of Miss Mailer’s arms, her legs propelling her like one of Sergeant’s bullets.
She lands on the chest of one of the men, and he’s staring into her face with frozen horror as she leans in and bites his throat out. His blood tastes utterly wonderful: he is her bread when she’s hungry, but there’s no time to enjoy it. Melanie scales his shoulders as he falls and jumps onto the man behind, folding her legs around his neck and leaning down to bite and claw at his face.
Miss Mailer screams Melanie’s name. It’s only just audible over the sound of the helicopter blades, which is louder now, and the screams of the third man as Melanie jumps across to him and her teeth close on his arm. He beats at her, but her jaws are so strong he can’t shake her loose, and then Sergeant hits him really hard in the face and he falls down.
Melanie lets go of his arm, spits out the piece of it that’s in her mouth.
The copter lifts off. Melanie looks up at it, hoping for one last sight of Miss Mailer’s face, but it just disappears into the dark and there’s nothing left of it but the sound.
Other men are coming. Lots of them.
Sergeant picks up his gun from the ground where it fell, checks it.
He seems to be satisfied.
The light swings all the way round until it’s full in their faces.
Sergeant looks at Melanie, and she looks back at him.
“Day just gets better and better, don’t it?” Sergeant says. It’s sarcasm, but Melanie nods, meaning it, because it’s a day of wishes coming true.
Miss Mailer’s arms around her, and now this.
“You ready, kid?” Sergeant asks.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Melanie says. Of course she’s ready.
“Then let’s give these bastards something to feel sad about.” The men bulk large in the dark, but they’re too late. The goddess Artemis is appeased. The ships are gone on the fair wind.
Mike Carey is the author of the Felix Castor novels and (along with Linda and Louise Carey) The Steel Seraglio. He has also written extensively for comics publishers DC and Marvel, including long runs on X-Men, Hellblazer, and Ultimate Fantastic Four. He wrote the comic book Lucifer for its entire run and is the co-creator and writer of the ongoing Vertigo series The Unwritten. He received a 2013 Edgar nomination for “Iphigenia in Aulis.”
Fate held her in its grasp for four decades. It makes her crave the slick feel of hot gun metal in her hand . . .
SLAUGHTERHOUSE BLUES
(Based on Nick Cave’s “O’Malley’s Bar” from Murder Ballads)
Tim Lebbon
He walks in through the front door, still tall, still thin, and her heart flutters like a frantic raven’s wing in her chest. For a second she thinks she’s going to drop dead and that all those years would have been for nothing. She breathes deeply and closes her eyes, keeping his image in her mind’s eye (though for a blink he’s younger and more beautiful, and he still has the ability to smile), and the drunken old fuck Max leans into her and asks wassa madda. She shoves Max away and looks again, and by now he’s at the bar, pulling up a stool, ordering a drink, and she notices something wrong with his hands.
Brady, the bartender and owner, pours the man a whiskey, and she hears the familiar story for the millionth time.
“Drunk at the Slaughterhouse before?”
The man shakes his head, and she frowns. Surely he has, she thinks. But then she starts to remember, and it’s as if his reappearance is polishing her memories, making them clean and crisp and sharp where down through the years they’ve become tarnished with age and overuse.
“Well, keep your head down if you hear anyone call it O’Malley’s.” Brady is already laughing in anticipation of his old, old joke. “That’s an old name now.” He chuckles, sounding like a bronchial pig. “We change the name of this place every time there’s a massacre!” He starts laughing out loud, and a few people around the bar join in. Max is one of them, even though he’s too far gone to have understood a word.
She stares right at the man, and for a moment she thinks it’s all going to happen again. He’s reaching into his jacket—
(what is wrong with his hands?)
—and a rush of memory and emotion overcomes her: fear and excitement, terror and delight. But he brings out only his wallet, awkwardly, and drops a twenty onto the bar. Brady smiles because he knows the guy’s staying for a while.
She smiles, too. He’s here again. She’s been waiting for this day for over forty years.
He didn’t take a drink because he never had the time. She was standing in the corner over by the pool table when she saw him enter, a place where real ladies didn’t hang out, and the guy she’d been watching potting ball after ball stood up and propped the end of the cue on his shoe. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, smoke curling up into his watering eye. He was too cool to move it away.
The man was tall and deadly and he walked directly to the bar without taking a single look around the room. That would haunt her for some time—the fact that he’d not even considered who would die when the shooting began—and he told O’Malle
y he was thirsty.
Shooting the barman before he had a chance to drink, the man turned around and started to say his words.
Her knees went weak and she hit the boards. Not through fear or shock—though both of those emotions were playing their own particular notes across her body—but from surprise at how fucking loud the gunshot had been.
She remained where she was behind the pool table, hearing the new shots and the crumple of bodies, the man’s words and his measured footsteps, and thinking to herself, He’s come to rescue me. She really believed that. He was here for her, and anyone who got in his way would find themselves—
Henry, the guy she’d been watching play pool and who she’d be- gun thinking she might fuck behind the bar later, took a bullet in the chest. He flipped back and his trousers exploded, spilling guts and bowels and blood across the polished wooden floor.
She stopped breathing then, and only started again when she’d crawled into the ladies’ toilet and was propped up in one of the stalls. Did he see me come in here? she wondered. Did he hear me? See the door open? Catch sight of me in the bar mirror while he was killing someone else? She sat there shaking, wondering and hoping that he had.
For years she’d felt that she had nothing to live for.
He’s come to rescue me.
She stands and walks across to the ladies’ room. The bar is much different now, of course. Back then it was been a smoky, dark place, where the subdued conversation was countered by the sound of O’Malley polishing and shelving his glasses, smashing empty bottles down the chute into the cellar, or arguing loudly about the latest news event. He’d been a cantankerous old bastard, changing his opinions depending on the weather or the angle of the sun, or just so he could counter whoever dared argue with him. The floor was bare wood, polished here and there but still wearing through and presenting dangerous trip hazards for those who’d had a few too many. The furniture was mismatched, the ceiling yellowed by cigarette smoke, the same nicotined color as most of the patrons. Now the bar is all glass and chrome, with full-height mirrors behind the bar itself, and casual leather seats scattered around in mock-random fashion. The pictures on the walls are modern art prints instead of rural landscapes, and though Brady still makes his jokes about the massacre, it’s no longer a visible, palpable part of this place’s history. Its name has changed more than once since then, its décor many times more, and it might as well be somewhere else entirely.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 16
