Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 1

by Jeff Strand

  But what if someone else sees it and thinks they found it first?

  Jason went back for the baby. Fast and backwards. When he got up next to it, he opened the passenger door, stretched across the seat on his stomach with his head in his palms and stared at the thing, with the car rumbling under his body. It was right there by his tire. His hands trembled a bit, and he told himself it was the low idle from the car. Not the fact that this was definitely a dead baby.

  No flies, no blood, no smell, nothing, he thought. No bugs, no red … just dead.

  It was on its stomach, too, and he studied the smooth, pink head and thought about rolling it over to see if it was a boy or a girl. Then he decided he liked not knowing. He considered drawing three lines on the back of its scalp so he’d never have to turn it over. Three lines, that’s all you need for two eyes and a mouth. Then he could pretend he found an alien instead.

  Now that was a dilemma, he thought. What would you rather find on the side of the road? A dead baby or a dead alien? Alien. What about a live baby or a dead alien? Live baby, definitely. I’d be big hero. Dead alien and you’d end up on the slab in Area 51 right next to it.

  A strange sound came from the car, as if it was thinking hard along with him, and he grabbed it by its swollen ankle and picked it up fast before he changed his mind. It was heavier than he expected, and he thought of stuffed toys left outside to soak up the rain. He flung it into the seat beside him.

  “Damn, what you been eatin’? That must be how it died,” he explained to the static. “First, someone lost the thing, maybe while they were changing a tire, and when it got left behind, there was no one around to stop it from putting things in its mouth. And everyone knows a baby on the side of the road will eat rocks all night long if no one is around to stop it …” He trailed off as he noticed something else in the roadside gravel as he was closing his door. He leaned out, reaching out slow so his back could crack, but also hoping someone would come along. It was a toy. Or it had been a toy at one time. It was smashed now, many times run over, and Jason couldn’t decipher what it had been. He knew what it was supposed to do though, and that was rattle. Babies liked things that rattled. This was a toy that had rattled once, then burst open under a wheel, all the popcorn kernels that had made those noises now scattered in a star pattern around it. He thought maybe it was homemade, sewn together from some dying stuffed animal. He counted the extra eyes and ear on the rattle and decide it was a bunch of animals, by the look of it. Something tightened in Jason’s chest, something about the toy affecting him in a way the baby hadn’t, and he shook his head hard, like a dog that got thrown in the pool or a cat reacting to a surprise gunshot, and he slammed his car door to get moving. He guessed his reaction was just from being down there at exhaust level, the fumes or something. He clicked the volume knob off, then reached over and strapped the baby in while the hiss of the stereo static faded away again. He didn’t want the thing rolling over onto his side of the car when he took any hard turns. He still remembered how important it was to stay on your own side when he was on a long drive in the backseat with his brother.

  When he clicked the seat belt over its distended belly, he noticed that he’d placed it onto the seat perfectly, carefully, just like any child. And right before he pulled back onto the road, his eyes took a snapshot of its face before he could stop himself. It was a boy.

  “So what?” Jason said, looking straight ahead. He played with the rearview and drove on, then leaned over and whispered to it without looking.

  “Hey, here’s a good one. What’s easier to unload? A truckload of bowling balls? Or a truckload of dead babies? Dead babies! Because you can use a pitchfork.”

  Jason sighed, satisfied he’d broken the tension.

  “So, you from around here? No one threw you out of the car, did they? You’d have been a little red comet if that had happened! You run away? Someone give birth to you in that ditch? No, there’s no cord. Can you imagine that? Some girl pulls over to have a baby and leave it behind, only she forgets the cord, right? Then, miles later, she gets pulled over ‘cause the cops see the baby bouncing behind the car. Now, that’s a worse ticket than not having a baby properly restrained in the car seat, ain’t it?” Jason’s smile dropped a little. “I should probably take you to the police now, shouldn’t I?” But an hour later, Jason was still driving, telling himself that he’d done nothing wrong. He worried someone would take it to a lab, cut it in half, count the rings to solve the mystery, then wonder what the hell he was doing driving around with it for so long. He honestly just wanted someone to scratch their head and ask him why he’d hauled a dead baby around the highways, and he imagined himself on TV, symbolizing detached youth everywhere or some such nonsense. This was right up there with those headlines about teens leaving babies in the toilets then heading to prom. No, this was worse. Nobody ever did what he was doing. He’d be the boy who drove around with a dead baby, telling it dead baby jokes.

  He leaned over again, still not looking.

  “Okay, what’s worse? Killing a baby, or driving around with it like it’s nothing? Hey, you remember those ‘what’s worse’ jokes? You know, what’s worse? Fifty dead babies in a garbage can or one dead baby in fifty garbage cans? That’s a tough one, ain’t it? I wonder what someone would say if they heard me right now. I am a true mystery.” Jason’s eyes got wide. “Holy shit! I wonder what someone would say if I took you to a movie! Do you want to go see a movie? It would have to be a drive-in though. I’d get in trouble if I carried you into a theater, especially if it was rated ‘R.’ They check I.D.’s these days.”

  He tilted the rearview to pretend someone was in the back seat listening to him.

  “Hey! What’s worse than finding a dead baby in the back seat of your car? Realizing you fucked it! So nasty.” He wished for a train or a red light so he’d have to slam on the brakes at least once. He leaned over and unhooked its seat belt, always without looking. He wanted to hit the brakes while he was talking to it, then act shocked when it bounced off the dashboard. He thought that would be hilarious and edgy as fuck. Especially if anyone saw it. But there were still no cars around. No one at all. He wondered if he’d missed the end of the world. This was a depressing thought, as he couldn’t imagine finding a dead baby then having no one to show how unimpressed he was by such a discovery. Then he had another idea. What if he turned the baby in to the authorities, but then the cops found out he went through a car wash before he surrendered it?

  They would be confused, suspicious as hell, but couldn’t do anything about it. He’d be pretty mysterious if he did that. Maybe they’d think I was washing blood off my car?

  Jason drove faster, looking for a car wash. He looked hard for one, needing desperately to find one, even wishing so hard that he visualized blowing the candles off a birthday cake with this wish and extinguishing every candle on his first try. And what the hell, he found one.

  •

  It was one of those crazy car washes where you drove through the mouth of a monster clown or something equally sinister. Not that he thought clowns were sinister.

  “Don’t be afraid of clowns,” he said. “Aren’t you sick of people saying they’re afraid of clowns? You will be. They’re all like, ‘you know what’s scary? A killer clown with sharp teeth. Who kills people. Oooh, I’m so weird being afraid of clowns! You know what else is scary? Alligators with nine heads! Keep them away from me!’”

  He’d seen car washes before where the garage-door entrance was painted to look like a dragon, or a dinosaur, depending on if it was a Creationist state. Whatever monster the starving-artist graffiti artists employees had come up with in-between wiping down cars, that was the theme. He was still far outside any town and surprised he found it, at least there was still no sign of highway life. This made the gyrating mechanical gorilla out front even more unnerving. The ape was painted green and clutching a bundle of deflated Valentine’s Day balloons with “$5” scrawled on each one in black marker. The ba
lloons swung around, lolling lazily in the dry wind, while the metal gears within the gorilla’s shoulder creaked and strained. Wires protruded around the joints where the fur had worn away, leading to a spool of cable and a power outlet behind the human-like feet. The gorilla stood grinning through green teeth, waving Jason in. He heard hissing and clanking inside the wash, but there were no cars exiting the back. Never any cars anywhere today but his own.

  Car washes were scary enough when you were little, Jason thought. Children must shit their pants when they take a wrong turn into this freakshow.

  He looked around as he pulled closer to the entrance, and seeing no one to take his money, and an “Out of Order” sign taped to a busted “Change Machine, he put a five-dollar bill in the mailbox by the door. The box was painted up as another smaller clown, with the inside of the flip-up painted like a tongue. Jason slammed it shut, and a loud bang made his heart jump. He looked up to see the garage door retracting and this monstrous tongue disappearing into the clown’s maw. A flashing green light beckoned him inside, and Jason gave the car a little gas to accommodate.

  “Now, I know babies get scared in car washes,” Jason whispered soothingly to his cargo. “I used to get scared in these myself, I’m not afraid to admit. But I’m sorry, I’m not going to close your eyes.”

  Something thumped under his seat as the car wash took control of the vehicle.

  “I heard that dogs go bonkers inside these things. Hey, that reminds me, what do you give a dead baby for its birthday? A dead puppy!”

  There was another jerk as the wheels found the sweet spot in the tracks and now the machines had taken over completely. Jason took his hands off his steering wheel and the green light flashed red. Water started trickling down the windshield as the tongue rolled closed behind him and his car was drawn the rest of the way into the dark. Jason stifled a laugh, some of it snorting from his nose to betray his nervousness.

  “You ever wonder where dead baby jokes come from?

  Wait, no, you ever wonder where dead babies come from? Dead stork brings ‘em! Just teasing. Hey, who comes up with all those jokes? Maybe you really need a dead baby around to get the best ideas going, to get the real funny stuff …”

  Something rocked the car hard, and Jason bit his tongue.

  “Ow. Hey! Why did the dead baby cross the road?

  Because it was nailed to the chicken!”

  The car lurched like a bronco as the water pressure increased, and he sat up a bit straighter. He jumped at a wet slap on the glass and watched an octopus of purple fingers dance down to his wiper blades. That part always scared the shit out of him as a kid—the way the tentacles squirmed there for a second, then lazily dragged themselves up and over the car, leaving a steaming white trail of bubbles and slime behind them. And when the two huge, green scrubbers started slowly moving up and down his doors, his heart may have skipped and he coughed a bit in panic, bringing both feet down hard on the brake pedal. Then he sighed and scratched himself hard behind the ears in disgust. For some reason, whenever those scrubbers moved past the car, he always thought the car was moving instead of the machines. The optical illusion never failed to make him stomp the brakes like a dumb shit.

  The heavy soap started spraying, and Jason looked down at his crossed arms, watching the pattern change as foam and water marbled the light across his skin. He adjusted the rearview mirror again to see how the dance of light looked on his face, then his eyes. But he saw the toy again in the back seat, and before he could hypothesize the species of stuffed animals skinned to create it, there was the blur of a tire flashing over it in his mind, and the popcorn kernels bursting, dancing, then rolling away to pop on the heat of the asphalt. Another tire rolled through his mind’s eye, and the popcorn on the road popped and boiled up higher in the heat. Then another tire as the popcorn sprouted wings like blowflies as the rattling sound magnified …

  But something didn’t sound right outside the car, outside in the wash. He looked down the hood and found the problem. The rattling was the sound of the antenna on his car getting hammered by a particularly angry green scrubber. It was bouncing back and forth way too hard, bending much too far, wiggling dangerously fast. Jason sighed. He’d forgotten to unscrew it before he went in. And even though he hadn’t seen the sign, he knew neither the clown nor the gorilla would be “responsible for anything lost or broken.” He wondered what someone would say if he complained, “Your evil-clown car wash scared my baby to death. You owe me a new rattler. At least!”

  The scrubbers were up and spinning on the side windows now, pounding away at the glass and filling the car with strobe lights and vibrations. He never saw them move like that before, never that high anyway. He could feel the tendrils almost touching each other on the roof above his head. Every sound in the wash seemed too loud, and he clicked on the radio and put his arm around the dead speaker in the passenger’s side headrest, listening for his soothing lullaby of static.

  “You know, I remember more jokes about killing babies, instead of jokes about babies that are already dead. Like, what’s red and squirms in the corner?”

  A fleet of scrubbers surrounded his car. He hadn’t counted them, but he was sure they were multiplying. The antenna was batted back and forth between two of them like Pong on the fastest level.

  “A baby playing with a razor! Okay, what’s blue and squirms in the corner?”

  Now the antenna was being slapped around harder, and under the splashing and the rattling, his radio was making a noise he’d never heard before.

  “A baby playing with a garbage bag! And what’s green and doesn’t squirm in the corner?”

  The antenna shook and wiggled so fast that it vanished, then it snapped and was gone for good, flipping end over end into a chaotic blur of chrome, water and suds.

  “Same baby! Three weeks later!”

  Dead air on his radio now. Seconds passed. Then minutes. His car had stopped moving forward, though it was still being washed. It felt like he’d been in there a long time. A lot more than five bucks worth anyway. He leaned over to talk to the speaker in the passenger-side headrest, only to jerk back his arm as if he’d been burned. He’d heard something strange, more of a feeling in his head than an actual sound. But something was very wrong. He crawled out of his driver’s seat and into the back to squint through the defroster lines to see if anyone was in the wash with him. It was hard to see through the steam and foam, and his breath fogged the glass. He was sure someone had to be working on getting the tracks moving again.

  Maybe they got distracted refilling the soap, blowing bubbles. Or blowing up more balloons, feeding the robot monkey.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he lied to the dead baby. “This is just like when you’re stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel. That never hurt nobody.”

  A frozen Ferris wheel, he thought. Now that meant forever.

  The car started shaking violently, and he wiped the fog rolling off his skin from all the windows, checking every direction for someone inside working on repairs. He saw no one and adjusted a side mirror to watch the scrubbers down beating on his wheel wells. He wondered what they were made of, if they would puncture his tires if they cleaned the same spot of rubber long enough.

  If a hundred moneys washed a hundred tires for a hundred years, they wouldn’t need to shake a spear …

  He figured anything could cut through anything if it worked on it long enough, and he remembered a picture he’d seen depicting the aftermath of a tornado. It made no sense at the time, but the photograph revealed a sock monkey stuck half in and half out of tree trunk, its soft head buried in the wood.

  If something gets spinning fast enough, he decided.

  Anything can happen. Is that what’s going on in here …

  He climbed back into the driver’s seat, then leaned over to the passenger’s side, not sure whether he was talking to the static or the baby, wondering again how easy it would be to not notice the end of the world.

  “What�
�s worse than running over a baby with your car? Getting it out of your treads.” He scratched his scalp hard in frustration. “Didn’t like that one? Fine. Why do babies have soft spots on their heads? So you can carry them ten at a time. Like a six-pack! Hey, you know what?”

  He squeezed the headrest under his arm affectionately. “I really don’t like those kinds of jokes. The ‘what’s worst’ ones are better. Remember the little kids and their ‘what’s worst’ jokes? Or ‘what’s grosser than gross’?” A strange smell rolled his eyeballs down to the passenger’s seat before he could stop himself.

  “Phew, someone’s baby needs changin’! Changin’ back to alive, mean.”

  Change machine out of order …

  Jason tried giggling, but he’d already made the mistake of looking. And he could have sworn the baby had been staring back at him before he could pinch his own eyes shut.

  And its mouth was open, too.

  He shook his head to erase the image, then his back was stiff and straight in his driver’s seat again, both hands on his window, pressing his nose against the glass. He wished he would have looked closer when he first found it back there on the road. Then he would have known if the eyes and mouth were already open. Then he’d know for sure if anything on the baby had changed. Or needed changing.

  What’s worst? he wondered. Open eyes or open mouth?

  At first he thought maybe the eyes? But now he wasn’t so sure which would be worse. But he was pretty sure the open mouth was where the smell was coming from.

  But what about that sound?

  He looked at digital clock in his dashboard, trying to remember what time he’d entered the wash. Then he tried to remember the make and model of his car. Or where he had been going. Or how long he’d been inside. He had none of these answers. And the clock seemed to be displaying military time, or something equally impossible. And his odometer was creeping backwards. Something about the wash was affecting things, this he was sure of. Maybe it was as simple as the heat and moisture and pressure of a car wash’s ecosystem, like a miniature storm over the Bermuda Triangle.