The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  I left her behind me in the long grass, her body a home for the scarred words she’d carved on her face with the same knife she’d used to butcher the dead and butcher me. All that remained of her was a barbed rictus grin and a pair of dead eyes staring up into the afternoon sun, as if staring at nothing at all. And that’s what she was to me – that’s what they all were now that they were dead. They were nothing, no matter what they’d done to themselves with knives and files, no matter what they’d done to the living they’d murdered or the dead they’d pried out of burying boxes. They were nothing at all, and I didn’t spare them another thought.

  Because there were other things to worry about – things like the one that had infected the children with a mouthful of spit-up blood. Sometimes those things came out of graves. Other times they came out of car trunks or meat lockers or off slabs in a morgue. But wherever they came from they were always born of a corpse, and there were corpses here aplenty.

  I didn’t see anything worrisome down in the open grave. Just stripped bones and tatters of red meat, but it was meat that wasn’t moving. That was good. So I took care of things. I rolled the dead Bloodfaces into the grave. I walked back to the cottonwood thicket at the ridge side of the cemetery and grabbed the gas can I’d brought from the pickup. I emptied it into the hole, then tossed the can in, too. I wasn’t carrying it back to the truck with a sliced-up arm.

  I lit a match and let it fall.

  The gas thupped alive and the hole growled fire.

  Fat sizzled as I turned my back on the grave. Already, other sounds were rising in the hollow. Thick, rasping roars. Branches breaking somewhere in the treeline behind the old funeral home. The sound of something big moving through the timber – something that heard my shotgun bark three times and wasn’t afraid of the sound.

  Whatever that thing was, I didn’t want to see it just now.

  I disappeared into the cottonwood thicket before it saw me.

  Barnes had lived in a converted hunting lodge on the far side of the lake. There weren’t any other houses around it, and I hadn’t been near the place in months. I’d left some stuff there, including medical supplies we’d scavenged from the local emergency room. If I was lucky, they would still be there.

  Thick weeds bristled over the dirt road that led down to Roy’s place. That meant no one had been around for a while. Of course, driving down the road would leave a trail, but I didn’t have much choice. I’d been cut and needed to do something about it fast. You take chances. Some are large and some are small. Usually, the worries attached to the small ones amount to nothing.

  I turned off the pavement. The dirt road was rutted, and I took it easy. My arm ached every time the truck hit a pothole. Finally, I parked under the carport on the east side of the old lodge. Porch steps groaned as I made my way to the door, and I entered behind the squared-off barrel of Barnes’ .45.

  Inside, nothing was much different than it had been a couple of months before. Barnes’ blood-spattered coat hung on a hook by the door. His reading glasses rested on the coffee table. Next to it, a layer of mould floated on top of a cup of coffee he’d never finished. But I didn’t care about any of that. I cared about the cabinet we’d stowed in the bathroom down the hall.

  Good news. Nothing in the cabinet had been touched. I stripped to the waist, cleaned the knife wound with saline solution from an IV bag, then stopped the bleeding as best I could. The gash wasn’t as deep as it might have been. I sewed it up with a hooked surgical needle, bandaged it, and gobbled down twice as many antibiotics as any doctor would have prescribed. That done, I remembered my wet boots. Sitting there on the toilet, I laughed at myself a little bit, because given the circumstances it seemed like a silly thing to worry about. Still, I went to the ground-floor bedroom I’d used during the summer and changed into a dry pair of Wolverines I’d left behind.

  Next I went to the kitchen. I popped the top on a can of chilli, found a spoon, and started towards the old dock down by the lake. There was a rusty swing set behind the lodge that had been put up by a previous owner; it shadowed a kid’s sandbox. Barnes hadn’t had use for either – he wasn’t even married – but he’d never bothered to change things around. Why would he? It would have been a lot of work for no good reason.

  I stopped and stared at the shadows beneath the swing set, but I didn’t stare long. The dock was narrow and more than a little rickety, with a small boathouse bordering one side. I walked past the boathouse and sat on the end of the dock for a while. I ate cold chilli. Cattails whispered beneath a rising breeze. A flock of geese passed overhead, heading south. The sun set, and twilight settled in.

  It was quiet. I liked it that way. With Barnes, it was seldom quiet. I guess you’d say he had a curious mind. The deputy liked to talk about things, especially things he didn’t understand, like those monsters that crawled out of corpses. Barnes called them lesser demons. He’d read about them in one of those books we found in the wreck. He had ideas about them, too. Barnes talked about those ideas a lot over the summer, but I didn’t want to talk about any of it. Talking just made me edgy. So did Barnes’ ideas and explanations . . . all those maybes and what ifs. Barnes was big on those; he’d go on and on about them.

  Me, I cared about simpler things. Things anyone could understand. Things you didn’t need to discuss, or debate. Like waking up before a razor-throated monster had a chance to swallow me whole. Or not running out of shotgun shells. Or making sure one of those things never spit a dead man’s blood in my face, so I wouldn’t take a file to my teeth or go digging in a graveyard for food. That’s what I’d cared about that summer, and I cared about the same things in the hours after a Bloodfaced lunatic carved me up with a dirty knife.

  I finished the chilli. It was getting dark. Getting cold, too, because winter was coming on. I tossed the empty can in the lake and turned back towards the house. The last purple smear of twilight silhouetted the place, and a pair of birds darted into the chimney as I walked up the dock. I wouldn’t have seen them if I hadn’t looked at that exact moment, and I shook my head. Birds building nests in October? It was just another sign of a world gone nuts.

  Inside, I settled on the couch and thought about lighting a fire. I didn’t care about the birds – nesting in that chimney was their own bad luck. I’d got myself a chill out at the dock, and there was a cord of oak stacked under the carport. Twenty minutes and I could have a good blaze going. But I was tired, and my arm throbbed like it had grown its own heartbeat. I didn’t want to tear the stitches toting a bunch of wood. I just wanted to sleep.

  I took some painkillers – more than I should have – and washed them down with Jack Daniel’s. After a while, the darkness pulled in close. The bedroom I’d used the summer before was on the ground floor. But I didn’t want to be downstairs in case anything came around during the night, especially with a cool liquid fog pumping through my veins. I knew I’d be safer upstairs.

  There was only one room upstairs – a big room, kind of like a loft.

  It was Barnes’ bedroom, and his blood was still on the wall.

  I didn’t care. I grabbed my shotgun. I climbed the stairs.

  Like I said: I was tired.

  Besides, I couldn’t see Barnes’ blood in the dark.

  At first, Roy and I stuck to the sheriff’s office, which was new enough to have pretty good security. When communication stopped and the whole world took a header, we decided that wasn’t a good idea anymore. We started moving around.

  My place wasn’t an option. It was smack dab in the middle of town. You didn’t want to be in town. There were too many blind corners, and too many fences you couldn’t see over. Dig in there, and you’d never feel safe no how many bullets you had in your clip. So I burned down the house. It never meant much to me, anyway. It was just a house, and I burned it down mostly because it was mine and I didn’t want anyone else rooting around in the stuff I kept there. I never went back after that.

  Barnes’ place was off the beaten
path. Like I said, that made it a good choice. I knew I could get some sleep there. Not too much, if you know what I mean. Every board in the old lodge seemed to creak, and the brush was heavy around the property. If you were a light sleeper – like me – you’d most likely hear anything that was coming your way long before it had a chance to get you.

  And I heard every noise that night in Barnes’ bedroom. I didn’t sleep well at all. Maybe it was my sliced-up arm or those painkillers mixing with the whiskey and antibiotics – but I tossed and turned for hours. The window was open a crack, and cold air cut through the gap like that barefooted girl’s knife. And it seemed I heard another knife scraping somewhere deep in the house, but it must have been those birds in the chimney, scrabbling around in their nest.

  Outside, the chained seats on the swing set squealed and squeaked in the wind. Empty, they swung back and forth, back and forth, over cool white sand.

  After a couple months, Barnes wasn’t doing so well. We’d scavenged a few of the larger summer houses on the other side of the lake, places that belonged to rich couples from down south. We’d even made a few trips into town when things seemed especially quiet. We’d gotten things to the point where we had everything we needed at the lodge. If something came around that needed killing, we killed it. Otherwise, we steered clear of the world.

  But Barnes couldn’t stop talking about those books he’d snatched from the wrecked Chrysler. He read the damned things every day. Somehow, he thought they had all the answers. I didn’t know about that. If there were answers in those books, you’d have one hell of a time pronouncing them. I knew that much.

  That wasn’t a problem for Barnes. He read those books cover to cover, making notes about those lesser demons, consulting dictionaries and reference books he’d swiped from the library. When he finished, he read them again. After a while, I couldn’t stand to look at him sitting there with those reading glasses on his face. I even got sick of the smell of his coffee. So I tried to keep busy. I’d do little things around the lodge, but none of them amounted to much. I chainsawed several oak trees and split the wood. Stacking it near the edge of the property to season would also give us some cover if we ever needed to defend the perimeter, so I did that, too. I even set some traps on the other side of the lodge, but after a while I got sloppy and began to forget where they were. Usually, that happened when I was thinking about something else while I was trying to work. Like Barnes’ maybes and what ifs.

  Sometimes I’d get jumpy. I’d hear noises while I was working. Or I’d think I did. I’d start looking for things that weren’t there. Sometimes I’d even imagine something so clearly I could almost see it. I knew that was dangerous . . . and maybe a little crazy. So I found something else to do – something that would keep my mind from wandering.

  I started going out alone during the day. Sometimes I’d run across a pack of Bloodfaces. Sometimes one of those demons . . . or maybe two. You never saw more than two at a time. They never travelled in packs, and that was lucky for me. I doubted I could have handled more than a couple, and even handling two . . . well, that could be dicey.

  But I did it on my own. And I didn’t learn about the damn things by reading a book. I learned by reading them. Watching them operate when they didn’t know I was there, hunting them down with the shotgun, blowing them apart. That’s how I learned – reading tales written in muscle and blood, or told by a wind that carried bitter scent and shadows that fell where they shouldn’t.

  And you know what? I found out that those demons weren’t so different. Not really. I didn’t have to think it through much, because when you scratched off the paint and primer and got down to it those things had a spot in the food chain just like you and me. They took what they needed when they needed it, and they did their best to make sure anything below them didn’t buck the line.

  If there was anything above them – well, I hadn’t seen it.

  I hoped I never would.

  I wouldn’t waste time worrying about it until I did.

  Come August, there were fewer of those things around. Maybe that meant the world was sorting itself out. Or maybe it just meant that in my little corner I was bucking that food chain hard enough to hacksaw a couple of links.

  By that time I’d probably killed fifteen of them. Maybe twenty. During a late summer thunderstorm, I tracked a hoofed Minotaur with centipede dreadlocks to an abandoned barn deep in the hollow. The damn thing surprised me, nearly ripping open my belly with its black horns before I managed to jam a pitchfork through its throat. There was a gigantic worm with a dozen sucking maws; I burned it down to cinders in the water-treatment plant. Beneath the high school football stadium, a couple rat-faced spiders with a web strung across a cement tunnel nearly caught me in their trap, but I left them dying there, gore oozing from their fat bellies drop by thick drop. The bugs had a half-dozen cocooned Bloodfaces for company, all of them nearly sucked dry but still squirming in that web. They screamed like tortured prisoners when I turned my back and left them alive in the darkness.

  Yeah. I did my part, all right.

  I did my part, and then some.

  Certain situations were harder to handle. Like when you ran into other survivors. They’d see you with a gun, and a pickup truck, and a full belly, and they’d want to know how you were pulling it off. They’d push you. Sometimes with questions, sometimes with pleas that were on the far side of desperate. I didn’t like that. To tell you the truth, it made me feel kind of sick. As soon as they spit their words my way, I’d want to snatch them out of the air and jam them back in their mouths.

  Sometimes they’d get the idea, and shut up, and move on. Sometimes they wouldn’t. When that happened I had to do something about it. Choice didn’t enter in to it. When someone pushed you, you had to push back. That was just the way the world worked – before demons and after.

  One day in late September, Barnes climbed out of his easy chair and made a field trip to the wrecked Chrysler. He took those books with him. I was so shocked when he walked out the door that I didn’t say a word.

  I was kind of surprised when he made it back to the lodge at nightfall. He brought those damn books back with him, too. Then he worked on me for a whole week, trying to get me to go out there. He said he wanted to try something and he needed some backup. I felt like telling him I could have used some backup myself on the days I’d been out dealing with those things while he’d been sitting on his ass reading, but I didn’t say it. Finally I gave in. I don’t know why – maybe I figured going back to the beginning would help Barnes get straight with the way things really were.

  There was no sun the day we made the trip, if you judged by what you could see. No sky either. Fog hung low over the lake, following the roads running through the hollow like they were dry rivers that needed filling. The pickup burrowed through the fog, tires whispering over wet asphalt, halogen beams cutting through all that dull white and filling pockets of darkness that waited in the trees.

  I didn’t see anything worrisome in those pockets, but the quiet that hung in the cab was another story. Barnes and I didn’t talk. Usually that would have suited me just fine, but not that day. The silence threw me off, and my hands were sweaty on the steering wheel. I can’t say why. I only know they stayed that way when we climbed out of the truck on County Road 14.

  Nothing much had changed on that patch of road. Corpses still lay on the asphalt – the road gang, and the bear-thing that had swallowed one of them whole before we blew it apart. They’d been chewed over by buzzards and rats and other miserable creatures, and they’d baked guts-and-all onto the road during the summer heat. You would have had a hell of a time scraping them off the asphalt, because nothing that mattered had bothered with them once they were dead.

  Barnes didn’t care about them, either. He went straight to the old Chrysler and hauled the dead driver from behind the steering wheel. The corpse hit the road like a sack of kindling ready for the flame. It was a sight. Crows must have been at the dri
ver’s face, because his fishgut lips were gone. Those scarred words carved on his skin still rode his jerky flesh like wormy bits of gristle, but now they were chiselled with little holes, as if those crows had pecked punctuation.

  Barnes grabbed Mr Fishguts by his necktie and dragged him to the spot in the road where the white line should have been but wasn’t.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “For what?”

  “If I’ve got it figured right, in a few minutes the universe is going to squat down and have itself a bite. It’ll be one big chunk of the apple – starting with this thing, finishing with all those others.”

  “Those books say so?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Barnes said, “and a whole lot more.”

  That wasn’t any kind of answer, but it put a cork in me. So I did what I was told. I stood guard. Mr Fishguts lay curled up in that busted-up foetal position. Barnes drew a skinning knife from a leather scabbard on his belt and started cutting off the corpse’s clothes. I couldn’t imagine what the hell he was doing. A minute later, the driver’s corpse was naked, razored teeth grinning up at us through his lipless mouth.

  Barnes knelt down on that unmarked road. He started to read.

  First from the book. Then from Mr Fishguts’ skin.

  The words sounded like a garbage disposal running backward. I couldn’t understand any of them. Barnes’ voice started off quiet, just a whisper buried in the fog. Then it grew louder, and louder still. Finally he was barking words, and screaming them, and spitting like a hellfire preacher. You could have heard him a quarter mile away.

  That got my heart pounding. I squinted into the fog, which was getting heavier. I couldn’t see a damn thing. I couldn’t even see those corpses glued to the road anymore. Just me and Barnes and Mr Fishguts, there in a tight circle in the middle of County Road 14.

  My heart went trip-hammer, those words thumping in time, the syllables pumping. I tried to calm down, tried to tell myself that the only thing throwing me off was the damn fog. I didn’t know what was out there. One of those inside-out grizzlies could have been twenty feet away and I wouldn’t have known it. A rat-faced spider could have been stilting along on eight legs, and I wouldn’t have seen it until the damn thing was chewing off my face. That Minotaur-thing with the centipede dreadlocks could have charged me at a dead gallop and I wouldn’t have heard its hooves on pavement . . . not with Barnes roaring. That was all I heard. His voice filled up the hollow with words written in books and words carved on a dead man’s flesh, and standing there blind in that fog I felt like those words were the only things in a very small world, and for a split second I think I understood just how those cocooned Bloodfaces felt while trapped in that rat-spider’s web.