The Year's Best Horror Stories 6

by Gerald W. Page (Ed. )

  “Glad to have you back, Curtis,” Capt. Warden said. “We’re way understrength, and replacements haven’t been coming in fast enough. Better get your gear together now, because at 1900 hours the company’s heading out on a night patrol and I want every man along.”

  Curtis shifted uneasily, transfixed by the saffron sclera of the captain’s eyes. The driver who had picked him up at the chopper pad had filled Curtis in on what had gone on during his eight weeks in the hospital. Seventeen men had died in the first ambush. The condition of the radioman’s body was blamed on the VC, of course; but that itself had contributed to rotted morale, men screaming in their sleep or squirting nervous shots off into the shadows. A month later, Warden had led another sweep. The lithe, athletic captain should have been a popular officer for his obvious willingness to share the dangers of his command; but when his second major operation ended in another disaster of bunkers and spider holes, the only emotion Dog Company could find for him was hatred. Everybody knew this area of operations was thick with VC and that it was Dog Company’s business to find them. But however successful the operations were from the division commander’s standpoint—the follow-ups had netted tons of equipment and abandoned munitions—Warden’s men knew that they had taken it on the chin twice in a row.

  It hadn’t helped that the body of Lt. Schaden, killed at the captain's side in the first exchange of fire, had been recovered the next day in eerily mutilated condition. It looked, the driver whispered, as though it had been gnawed on by something.

  They moved out in the brief dusk, nervous squads shrunk to the size of fire teams under the poundings they had taken. The remainder of the battalion watched Dog’s departure in murmuring cliques. Curtis knew they were making bets on how many of the patrol wouldn’t walk back this time. Well, a lot of people in Dog itself were wondering the same.

  The company squirmed away from the base, avoiding known trails. Capt. Warden had a destination, though; Curtis, again marching just behind the command group, could see the captain using a penlight to check compass and map at each of their frequent halts. The light was scarcely necessary. The mid-afternoon downpour had washed clean the sky for the full moon to blaze in. It made for easier movement through the tangles of trees and vines, but it would light up the GI’s like ducks in a shooting gallery if they blundered into another VC bunker complex.

  The trade dollar in Curtis’s pocket flopped painfully against him. The bruise it had given him during the ambush still throbbed. It was starting to hurt more than his ankles did, but nothing would have convinced him to leave it in his locker now. He’d gotten back the last time, hadn’t he? Despite the murderous crossfire, the tree, and the . . . other. Curtis gripped his sweaty M16 tighter. Maybe it hadn't been Maria Theresa’s chop-scarred face that got him through, but he wasn’t missing any bets.

  Because every step he took into the jungle deepened his gut-wrenching certainty that Dog Company was about to catch it again.

  The captain grunted a brief order into the phone flexed to his RTO. The jungle whispered “halt” from each of the platoon leaders. Warden’s face was in a patch of moonlight. His left hand cradled the compass, but he paid it no attention. Instead his lean, dominant nose lifted and visibly snuffled the still air. With a nod and a secret smile that Curtis shivered to see, the captain spoke again Into the radio to move the company out.

  Three minutes later, the first blast of shots raked through them.

  The bullet hit the breech of Curtis’s rifle instead of simply disemboweling him. The dented barrel cracked down across both of his thighs with sledge hammer force. His left thumb was dislocated, though his right hand, out of the path in which the .51 cal had snatched the rifle, only tingled. Curtis lay on his back amazed, listening to the thump-crack of gunfire and bullets passing overhead. He was not even screaming: the pain was yet to come.

  An American machine gun ripped a long red streak to within inches of Curtis’s head, no less potentially deadly for not being aimed at him. The wounded soldier fumbled open his breast pocket and clutched at the lucky piece. It was the only action to which he could force his punished body. The moon glared grimly down.

  Something moved near Curtis. Capt. Warden, bare headed, was snaking across the jungle floor toward him. Warden grinned. His face slumped suddenly like lead in a mold, shaping itself into a ghastly new form that Curtis had seen once before. The Warden-thing’s fangs shone as it poised, then leaped—straight into a stream of Communist fire.

  A two-ounce bullet meat-axed through the thing’s chest back to front, slapping it against a tree. Curtis giggled in relief before he realized that the creature was rising to its knees. Fluid shock had blasted a great crater in the flesh over its breastbone, and the lower half of its face was coated with blood gulped out of its own lungs. The eyes were bright yellow and horribly alive, and as Curtis stared in fascination, the gaping wound began to close. The thing took a step toward the helpless soldier, a triumphant grimace sweeping over its distorted features.

  Without conscious direction, Curtis’s thumb spun the silver dollar toward the advancing creature. The half-healed wound-lips in the thing’s chest seemed to suck the coin in. The scream that followed was that of an animal spindled on white-hot wire, but it ended quickly in a gurgle as dissolution set in.

  The stretcher team brought Curtis out in the morning. His right hand had been dipped into the pool of foulness soaking the ground near him, and the doctors could not unclench the fist from the object it was frozen on until after the morphine had taken hold.

  CHILDREN OF THE CORN by Stephen King

  Stephen King appeared a couple of times in the late ’60s in Startling Mystery Stories, the companion to Magazine of Horror, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes. It was a magazine that featured the early fiction of such as Ramsey Campbell, Eddy Bertin, Gerald Page and Richard Lupoff; but King soon appeared as a novelist with books like Carrie (which Brian da Palma turned into the best film of its kind since Psycho), Salem’s Lot and The Shining, probably becoming the current best-selling writer of horror fiction in the world. “Children of the Corn” demonstrates why, too: he writes very strong horror stuff. Right now King is living in England, reportedly in a haunted house. His agent, Kirby McCauley, tells us that he’s “particularly happy.”

  Burt turned the radio on too loud and didn’t turn it down because they were on the verge of another argument, and he didn’t want it to happen. He was desperate for it not to happen.

  Vicky said something.

  “What?” He shouted.

  “Turn it down! Do you want to break my eardrums?”

  He bit down hard on what might have come through his mouth and turned it down.

  Vicky was fanning herself with her scarf even though the T-Bird was air-conditioned. “Where are we, anyway?”

  “Nebraska.”

  She gave him a cold, neutral look. “Yes, Burt. I know we’re in Nebraska, Burt. But where the hell are we?”

  “You’ve got the road atlas. Look it up. Or can’t you read?”

  “Such wit. This is why we got off the turnpike. So we could look at three hundred miles of corn. And enjoy the wit and wisdom of Burt Robeson.”

  He was gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles were white. He decided he was holding it that tightly because if he loosened up, why, one of those hands might just fly off and hit the ex-prom queen beside him right in the chops. We’re saving our marriage, he told himself. Yes. We’re doing it the same way our GIs went about saving villages in the war.

  “Vicky,” he said carefully. “I have driven fifteen hundred miles on turnpikes since we left Boston. I did all that driving myself because you refused to drive. Then—”

  “I did not refuse!” Vicky said hotly. “Just because I get migraines when I drive for a long time—”

  “Then when I asked you if you’d navigate for me on some of the secondary roads, you said, ‘Sure, Burt.’ Those were your exact words. ‘Sure, Burt.’ Then—”

&nbs
p; “Sometimes I wonder how I ever wound up married to you.”

  “By saying two little words. And I think you’ve been saying the opposite two ever since then.”

  She stared at him for a moment, white-lipped, and then picked up the road atlas. She turned the pages savagely.

  It had been a mistake leaving the turnpike, Burt thought morosely. It was a shame, too, because up until then they had been doing pretty well, treating each other almost like human beings. It had sometimes seemed that this trip to the coast, ostensibly to see Vicky’s brother and his wife but actually a last-ditch attempt to patch up their own marriage, was going to work.

  But since they left the pike, it had been bad again. How bad? Well, terrible, actually.

  “We left the turnpike at Hamburg, right?”

  “Right.”

  “There’s nothing more until Gatlin,” she said. “Twenty miles. Wide place in the road. Do you suppose we could stop there and get something to eat? Or does your almighty schedule say we have to go until two o’clock like we did yesterday?”

  He took his eyes off the road to look at her. “I’ve about had it, Vicky. As far as I’m concerned, we can turn around right here and go home and see that lawyer you wanted to talk to. Because this isn't working at—”

  She had faced forward again, her expression stonily set. It suddenly turned to surprise and fear. “Burt, look out; you’re going to—”

  He turned his attention back to the road just in time to see something vanish under the T-Bird’s bumper. A moment later, while he was only beginning to switch from gas to brake, he felt something thump sickeningly under the front and then the back wheels. They were thrown forward as the car braked along the center line, decelerating from fifty to zero along black skid marks.

  “A dog,” he said. “Tell me it was a dog, Vicky.”

  Her face was a pallid, cottage-cheese color. “A boy. A little boy. He just ran out of the corn and . . . congratulations, tiger.”

  She fumbled the car door open, leaned out, threw up.

  Burt sat straight behind the T-Bird’s wheel, hands still gripping it loosely. He was aware of nothing for a long time but the rich, dark smell of fertilizer.

  Then he saw that Vicky was gone; and when he looked in the outside mirror, he saw her stumbling clumsily back toward a heaped bundle that looked like a pile of rags. She was ordinarily a graceful woman, but now her grace was gone, robbed.

  It's manslaughter. That's what they call it. I took my eyes off the road.

  He turned the ignition off and got out. The wind rustled softly through the growing man-high corn, making a weird sound like respiration. Vicky was standing over the bundle of rags now, and he could hear her sobbing.

  He was halfway between the car and where she stood, and something caught his eye on the left, a gaudy splash of red amid all the green, as bright as barn paint.

  He stopped, looking directly into the corn. He found himself thinking (anything to untrack from those rags that were not rags) that it must have been a fantastically good growing season for corn. It grew close together, almost ready to bear. You could plunge into those neat, shaded rows and spend a day trying to find your way out again. But the neatness was broken here. Several tall cornstalks had been broken and leaned askew. And what was that farther back in the shadows?

  “Burt!” Vicky screamed. “Don’t you want to come see? So you can tell all your poker buddies what you bagged in Nebraska? Don’t you—” But the rest was lost in fresh sobs. Her shadow was puddled starkly around her feet. It was almost noon.

  Shade closed over him as he entered the corn. The red barn paint was blood. There was a low, somnolent buzz as flies lit, tasted, and buzzed off again . . . maybe to tell others. There was more blood on the leaves farther in. Surely it couldn’t have splattered this far? And then he was standing over the object he had seen from the road. He picked it up.

  The neatness of the rows was disturbed here. Several stalks were canted drunkenly; two of them had been broken clean off. The earth had been gouged. There was blood. The corn rustled. With a little shiver, he walked back to the road.

  Vicky was having hysterics, screaming unintelligible words at him, crying, laughing. Who would have thought it could end in such a melodramatic way? He looked at her and saw he wasn’t having an identity crisis or a difficult life transition or any of those trendy things. He hated her. He gave her a hard slap across the face.

  She stopped short and put a hand against the reddening impression of his fingers. “You’ll go to jail, Burt,” she said solemnly.

  “I don’t think so,” he said and put at her feet the suitcase he had found in the corn.

  “What—?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it belonged to him.” He pointed to the sprawled, face-down body that lay in the road. No more than thirteen, from the look of him.

  The suitcase was old. The brown leather was battered and scuffed. Two hanks of clothesline had been wrapped around it and tied in large, clownish grannies. Vicky bent to undo one of them, saw the blood greased into the knot, and withdrew.

  Burt knelt and turned the body over gently.

  “I don’t want to look,” Vicky said, staring down helplessly anyway. And when the staring, sightless face flopped up to regard them, she screamed again. The boy’s face was dirty, his expression a grimace of terror. His throat had been cut.

  Burt got up and put his arms around Vicky as she began to sway. “Don’t faint,” he said very quietly. “Do you hear me, Vicky? Don’t faint.”

  He repeated it over and over, and at last she began to recover and held him tightly. They might have been dancing, there on the noon-struck road with the boy’s corpse at their feet. Burt’s stomach churned.

  “Vicky?”

  “What?” Muffled against his shirt.

  “Go back to the car and put the keys in your pocket. Get the blanket out of the backseat and my rifle. Bring them here.”

  “The rifle?”

  “Someone cut his throat. Maybe he’s watching us.”

  Her head jerked up, and her wide eyes considered the corn. It marched away as far as the eye could see, undulating up and down small dips and rises of land.

  “I imagine whoever did it is gone. But why take any chances? Go on. Do it.”

  She walked stiltedly back to the car, her shadow following, a dark mascot that stuck close at this hour of the day. When she leaned into the back seat, Burt squatted beside the boy. White male, no distinguishing marks. Run over, yes, but the T-Bird hadn’t cut the kid’s throat. It had been cut raggedly and inefficiently—no army sergeant had shown the killer the finer points of hand-to-hand assassination—but the final effect had been deadly. He had either run or been pushed through the last thirty feet of corn, dead or mortally wounded. And Burt Robeson had ran him down. If the boy had still been alive when the car hit him, his life had been cut short by thirty seconds at most.

  Vicky tapped him on the shoulder, and he jumped.

  She was standing with the brown army blanket over her left arm, the cased pump shotgun in her right hand, her face averted. He took the blanket and spread it on the road. He rolled the body onto it. Vicky uttered a desperate little moan.

  “You okay?” He looked up at her. “Vicky?”

  “Okay,” she said in a strangled voice.

  He flipped the sides of the blanket over the body and scooped it up, hating the thick, dead weight of it. It tried to make a U in his arms and slither through his grasp. He clutched it tighter, and they walked back to the T-Bird.

  “Open the trunk,” he grunted.

  The trunk was full of travel stuff, suitcases, and souvenirs. Vicky shifted most of it into the back seat, and Burt slipped the body into the made space and slammed the trunk lid down. A sigh of relief escaped him.

  Vicky was standing by the driver’s side door, still holding the cased rifle.

  “Just put it in the back and get in.”

  He looked at his watch and saw that only fifteen minute
s had passed. It seemed like hours.

  “What about the suitcase?” she asked.

  He trotted back down the road to where it stood on the white line, like the focal point in an Impressionist painting. He picked it up by its tattered handle and paused for a moment He had a strong sensation of being watched. It was a feeling he had read about in books, mostly cheap fiction, and he had always doubted its reality. Now he didn’t. It was as if there were people in the corn, maybe a lot of them, coldly estimating whether the woman could get the gun out of the case and use it before they could grab him, drag him into the shady rows, cut his throat—

  Heart beating thickly, he ran back to the car, pulled the keys out of the trunk lock, and got in.

  Vicky was crying again. Burt got them moving, and before a minute had passed, he could no longer pick out in the rearview mirror the spot where it had happened.

  “What did you say the next town was?” he asked.

  “Oh.” She bent over the road atlas again. “Gatlin. We should be there in ten minutes.”

  “Does it look big enough to have a police station?”

  “No. It’s just a dot”

  “Maybe there’s a constable.”

  They drove in silence for a while. They passed a silo on the left. Nothing else but corn. Nothing passed them going the other way, not even a farm truck.

  “Have we passed anything since we got off the turnpike, Vicky?”

  She thought about it. “A car and a tractor. At that intersection.”

  “No, since we got on this road. Route 17.”