The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  He watched his wife feeding the baby. The sight of Allie cradling the child made him needful; the need was on him before he could think about it. Allie was skinny, sure, but she looked good in her new swimsuit, and her hair was light brown and pretty in the reflected sunlight and her gray eyes had the shine of life in them again, for a little while. He said, “Allie?” and when she looked at him she saw the need in his face. He touched her shoulder, and she leaned over and kissed him on the lips. The kiss lingered, grew soft and wet and his tongue found hers. She smiled at him, her eyes hazy, and she put the child down on a beach towel.

  Kyle didn’t care if Tommy saw. They were beyond the need for privacy. A precious moment could not be turned aside. Kyle and Allie lay together under the yellow umbrella, their bodies damp and entwined, their hearts beating hard, and out in the waves Tommy pretended not to see and went diving for sand dollars. He found ten.

  The sun was sinking. It made the Gulf of Mexico turn the color of fire, and way out past the shallows dolphins played.

  “It’ll be getting dark soon,” Kyle said at last. The moon was coming out, a slice of silver against the east’s darkening blue. “I’ve got somebody’s car keys. Want to ride up to the Miracle Mile?”

  Allie said that would be fine, and she held Hope against her breasts.

  The wind had picked up. It blew stinging sand against their legs as they walked across the beach. Tommy stopped to throw a shell. “I got a skimmer, Dad!” he shouted.

  In the room, Allie put on a pair of white shorts over her wet suit. Tommy wore a T-shirt with the computer image of a rock band on the front, and baggy orange cutoffs. Kyle dry-shaved with his razor, then dressed in a pair of khaki trousers and a dark blue pullover shirt. As he was lacing up his sneakers, he gave Tommy the car keys. “It’s a blue Toyota. Tennessee tag. Why don’t you go start her up?”

  “You mean it? Really?”

  “Why not?”

  “Allll right!”

  “Wait a minute!” Kyle cautioned before Tommy could leave. “Allie, why don’t you go with him? I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

  She frowned, reading his mood. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just want to sit here and think. I’ll be there by the time you get the car ready.”

  Allie took the baby, and she and Tommy went around to the parking lot. In the gathering dark, Kyle sat on the mattress and stared at the cracks in the wall. This was their honeymoon motel. It had once seemed like the grandest place on earth. Maybe it still was.

  When Kyle opened the Toyota’s door and Tommy slid into the back seat, he was wearing his poplin windbreaker, zipped up to his chest. He got behind the wheel, and he said, “Let’s go see it.”

  Theirs was the only car that moved on the long, straight road called the Strip. Kyle turned on the headlights, but it wasn’t too dark to see the destruction on either side of them.

  “We ate there last summer,” Tommy said, and pointed at a heap of rubble that used to be a Pizza Hut. They drove past T-Shirt City, the Shell Shack, and the Dixie Hot Shoppe, where a cook named Pee Wee used to make the best grouper sandwiches Kyle had ever eaten. All those places were dark hulks now. He kept going at a slow, steady speed. “Cruising the Strip,” he and his buddies used to call it, when they came looking for girls and good times on spring break. His first roaring drunk was in a motel called the Surf’s Inn. His first poker game had been played at Perdido Beach. He’d lost his first real fight behind a bar here, and ended up with a busted nose. He’d met the first girl he’d . . . well, there had been a lot of firsts at Perdido Beach.

  God, there were ghosts here.

  “Sun’s almost gone,” Tommy said.

  Kyle turned the car to a place where they could watch the sunset over a motel’s ruins. It was going down fast, the Gulf streaked with dark gold, orange, and purple. Allie’s hand found her husband’s; it was the hand with her wedding ring on it. The baby cried a little, and Kyle knew how she felt. The sun went away in a last scarlet flash, and then it was gone toward the other side of the world and the night was closing in.

  “It was pretty, wasn’t it?” Allie asked. “Sunsets are always so pretty at the beach.”

  Kyle started driving again, taking them to the Miracle Mile. His heart was beating hard, his palms damp on the wheel. Because there it was, the paradise of his memories. He pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped.

  The last of the light glinted on the rails of the roller coaster. The Ferris wheel’s cars were losing their paint, and rocked in the strengthening wind. Another casualty of Jolene was the mad mouse’s maze of tracks. The long red roof of the Hang Out dance pavilion, the underside of which was painted with Day-Glo stars and comets, had been stripped to the boards, but the open-air building still stood. Within the smashed windows of the Beach Arcade, the pinball machines had been overturned. Metal rods dangled down from the Sky Needle, its foundation cracked. The concession stand that used to sell foot-long hot dogs and flavored snow cones had been flattened. The water slide had survived, though, and so had a few of the other mechanical rides. The merry-go-round—a beauty of carved, leaping lions and proud horses—remained almost unscathed. Fit for the junkyard were the haunted house and hall of mirrors, but the fun house with its entrance through a huge red grin was still there.

  “We met here,” Allie said. She was talking to Tommy. “Right over there.” She pointed toward the roller coaster. “Your father was in line behind me. I was with Carol Akins and Denise McCarthy. When it came time for us to get on, I had to sit with him. I didn’t know him. I was sixteen, and he was eighteen. He was staying at the Surf’s Inn. That’s where all the hoods stayed.”

  “I wasn’t a hood,” Kyle said.

  “You were what a hood was then. You drank and smoked and you were looking for trouble.” She stared at the roller coaster, and Kyle watched her face. “We went around four times.”

  “Five.”

  “Five,” she recalled, and nodded. “The fifth time we rode in the front car. I was so scared I almost wet my pants.”

  “Aw, Mom!” Tommy said.

  “He wrote me a letter. It came a week after I got home. There was sand in the envelope.” She smiled, a faint smile, and Kyle had to look somewhere else. “He said he hoped we could see each other again. Do you remember that, Kyle?”

  “Like yesterday,” he answered.

  “I dreamed about the Miracle Mile, for a long time after that. I dreamed we would be together. I was a silly thing when I was sixteen.”

  “You’re still that way,” Tommy said.

  “Amen,” Kyle added.

  They sat there for a few more minutes, staring down the darkening length of the Miracle Mile. Many lives had crossed here, many had come and gone, but this place belonged to them. They knew it, in their hearts. It was theirs, forever. Their linked initials cut into a wooden railing of the Hang Out said so. It didn’t matter that there might be ten thousand more initials carved in the pavilion; they had returned here, and where were the others?

  The wind made the Ferris wheel’s cars creak, but otherwise silence reigned. Kyle broke it. “We ought to go to the pier. That’s what we ought to do.”

  The long fishing pier just past the Miracle Mile, where the bait used to be cut and reeled out every hour of the day and night. He and his father used to go fishing there, while his mother stretched out on a folding chair and read the forms from the dog track up the highway.

  “I’m going to need some Solarcaine,” Allie said as they drove past the Miracle Mile. “My arms are stinging.”

  “And I’m thirsty,” Tommy said. “Can we get something to drink?”

  “Sure. We’ll find something.”

  The pier—LONGEST PIER ON THE PANHANDLE, the battered metal sign said—was a half mile past the amusement park. Kyle parked in front of it, in a deserted lot. A soft drink machine stood inside the pier’s admission gate, but without electricity it was useless. Tommy got his arm up inside it and grasped a can
but he couldn’t pull it out. Kyle turned the machine over and tried to break it open. Its lock held, a last grip on civilization.

  “Damn,” Tommy said, and kicked the machine.

  Next door to the pier, across the lot, was the rubble of what had been a seafood restaurant. The sign remained, a swordfish riding a surfboard. “Why don’t we try over there?” Kyle asked, placing his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Maybe we can find some cans. Allie, we’ll be right back.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” he said. “You wait on the pier.”

  Allie stood very still. In the deepening gloom, Kyle could only see the outline of her face. “I want to talk to Tommy,” Kyle told her. She didn’t move; it seemed to him she was holding her breath. “Man talk,” he said.

  Silence.

  Finally, she spoke. “Come right back. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And don’t step on a nail. Be careful. Okay?”

  “We will be. Watch where you walk too.” He guided Tommy toward the ruins, and the wind shrilled around them.

  They were almost there when Tommy asked what he wanted to talk about. “Just some stuff,” Kyle answered. He glanced back. Allie was on the pier, facing away from them. Maybe she was looking at the sea, or maybe at the Miracle Mile. It was hard to tell.

  “I got too much sun. My neck’s burning.”

  “Oh,” Kyle said, “you’ll be all right.”

  The stars were coming out. It was going to be a beautiful night. He kept his hand on Tommy’s shoulder, and together they walked into the wreckage beneath the surfing swordfish. They kept going, over glass and planks, until Kyle had the remnant of a cinder block wall between them and Allie.

  “Dad, how’re we going to find anything in here? It’s so dark.”

  “Hold it. See that? There beside your right foot? Is that a can?”

  “I can’t see it.”

  Kyle unzipped his windbreaker. “I think it is.” A lump had lodged in his throat, and he could hardly speak. “Can you see it?”

  “Where?”

  Kyle placed one hand against the top of his son’s head. It was perhaps the most difficult movement of flesh and bone he had ever made in his life. “Right there,” he said, as he drew the .38 from his waistband with his other hand. Click.

  “What was that, Dad?”

  “You’re my good boy,” Kyle croaked, and he put the barrel against Tommy’s skull.

  No. This was the most difficult movement of flesh and bone.

  A spasm of his finger on the trigger. A terrible crack that left his eardrums ringing.

  It was done.

  Tommy slid down, and Kyle wiped his hand on the leg of his trousers.

  Oh Jesus, he thought. A sense of panic swelled inside him. Oh Jesus, I should’ve found him something to drink before I did it.

  He staggered, tripped over a pile of boards and cinder blocks and went down on his knees in the dark, the after sound of the shot still echoing. My God, he died thirsty. Oh my God, I just killed my son. He shivered and moaned, sickness burning in his stomach. It came to him that he might have only wounded the boy, and Tommy might be lying there in agony. “Tommy?” he said. “Can you hear me?” No, no; he’d shot the boy right in the back of the head, just as he’d planned. If Tommy wasn’t dead, he was dying and he knew nothing. It had been fast and unexpected and Tommy hadn’t had a chance to even think about death.

  “Forgive me,” Kyle whispered, tears streaking down his face. “Please forgive me.”

  It took him a while to find the strength to stand. He put the pistol away and zipped his windbreaker up again, and then he wiped his face and left the ruins where his son’s body lay. Kyle walked toward the pier, where Allie stood with the baby in the deep purple dark.

  “Kyle?” she called before he reached her.

  “Yes.”

  “I heard a noise.”

  “Some glass broke. It’s all right.”

  “Where’s Tommy, Kyle?”

  “He’ll be here in a few minutes,” Kyle said, and he stopped in front of her. He could feel the sea moving below him, amid the pier’s concrete pilings. “Why don’t we walk to the end?”

  Allie didn’t speak. Hope was sleeping, her head against Allie’s shoulder.

  Kyle looked up at the sky full of stars and the silver slice of moon. “We used to come out here together. Remember?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “We used to come out and watch the fishermen at night. I asked you to marry me at the end of the pier. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.” A quiet voice.

  “Then when you said yes I jumped off. Remember that?”

  “I thought you were crazy,” Allie said.

  “I was. I am. Always will be.”

  He saw her tremble, violently. “Tommy?” she called into the night. “Tommy, come on now!”

  “Walk with me. All right?”

  “I can’t . . . I can’t . . . think, Kyle. I can’t . . .”

  Kyle took her hand. Her fingers were cold. “There’s nothing to think about. Everything’s under control. Do you understand?”

  “We can . . . stay right here,” she said. “Right here. It’s safe here.”

  “There’s only one place that’s safe,” Kyle said. “It’s not here.”

  “Tommy?” she called, and her voice broke.

  “Walk with me. Please.” He gripped her hand tighter. She went with him.

  Jolene had bitten off the last forty feet of the pier. It ended on a jagged edge, and below them the Gulf surged against the pilings. Kyle put his arm around his wife and kissed her cheek. Her skin was hot and damp. She leaned her head against his shoulder, as Hope’s head was against her own. Kyle unzipped his windbreaker.

  “It was a good day, wasn’t it?” he asked her, and she nodded.

  The wind was in their faces, coming in hard off the sea. “I love you,” Kyle said.

  “I love you,” she answered.

  “Are you cold?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave her his windbreaker, and zipped it up around her shoulders and the baby. “Look at those stars!” he said. “You can’t see so many stars anywhere else but the beach, can you?”

  She shook her head.

  Kyle kissed her temple and put a bullet into it.

  Then he let her go.

  Allie and the baby fell off the pier. Kyle watched her body go down and splash into the Gulf. The waves picked her up, closed over her, turned her on her stomach and made her hair float like an opening fan. Kyle looked up at the sky. He took a deep breath, cocked the pistol again and put the barrel into his mouth, pointed upward toward his brain.

  God forgive me there is no Hell there is no—

  He heard a low humming sound. The noise, he realized, of machinery at work.

  Lights came on, a bright shock in the sky. The stars faded. Multicolored reflections scrawled across the moving waves.

  Music. The sound of a distant pipe organ.

  Kyle turned around, his bones freezing.

  The Miracle Mile.

  The Miracle Mile was coming to life.

  Lights rimmed the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster’s rails. Floods glared over the Super Water Slide. The merry-go-round was lit up like a birthday cake. A spotlight had been pointed upward, and combed the night above the Miracle Mile like a call to celebration.

  Kyle’s finger was on the trigger. He was ready.

  The Ferris wheel began to turn: a slow, groaning process. He could see figures in the gondolas. The center track of the roller coaster started moving with a clanking of gears, and then the roller coaster cars were cranked up to the top of the first incline. There were people in the cars. No, not people. Not human beings. Them.

  They had taken over the Miracle Mile.

  Kyle heard them scream with delight as the roller coaster’s cars went over the incline like a long, writhing snake.

  The merry-go-round was turning. The pipe organ m
usic, a scratchy recording, was being played from speakers at the carousel’s center. Kyle watched the riders going around, and he pulled the pistol’s barrel from his mouth. Light bulbs had blinked on in the Hang Out, and now the sound of rock music spilled out from a jukebox. Kyle could see them in the pavilion, a mass of them pressed together and dancing at the edge of the sea.

  They had taken everything. The night, the cities, the towns, freedom, the law, the world.

  And now the Miracle Mile.

  Kyle grinned savagely, as tears ran down his cheeks.

  The roller coaster rocketed around. The Ferris wheel was turning faster.

  They had hooked up generators, of course, there in the amusement park. They’d gotten gasoline to run the generators from a gas station on the Strip.

  You could make bombs out of gasoline and bottles.

  Find those generators. Pull the plug on the Miracle Mile.

  He had four bullets in the gun. The extras had been in case he screwed up and wounded instead of killed. Four bullets. The car keys had been in the windbreaker. Sleep well, my darling, he thought.

  I will be joining you.

  But not yet. Not yet.

  Maybe he could find a way to make the roller coaster’s cars jump the tracks. Maybe he could blow up the Hang Out, with all of them mashed up together inside. They would make a lovely bonfire, on this starry summer night. He gritted his teeth, his guts full of rage. They might take the world, but they would not take his family. And they would pay for taking the Miracle Mile, if he could do anything about it.

  He was insane now. He knew it. But the instant of knowing was pulled away from him like Allie’s body in the waves, and he gripped the pistol hard and took the first step back along the pier toward shore.

  Careful. Keep to the darkness. Don’t let them see you. Don’t let them smell you.

  Screams and laughter soared over the Miracle Mile, as a solitary figure walked back with a gun in his hand and flames in his mind.

  It came to Kyle that his vacation was over.

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  Taking Down the Tree

  ALTHOUGH HE HAS only published one novel (Excavation in 1987), Steve Rasnic Tem has carved an impressive niche for himself as a prolific short story writer.