The Best New Horror 6

by Stephen Jones

  A banner was held up. Comité de los Disaparidos de los Angeles, Committee of the Disappeared of the Angels. No, Committee of the Disappeared of Los Angeles.

  He was uncomfortable. The chanting was louder, the goons’ smiles set in concrete. The black guard forced his gauntlet palms close together and an arc crackled between them. The spokeswoman gave up arguing with the ranking guard and joined her voice with the chant.

  Stuart managed to get out from between the factions. The officer spoke into a throat-mike which amplified his voice to a Crack of Doom, instructing the women to “kindly disperse and clear the square.” One woman fell on him and stabbed his armoured chest with something black and stubby, a marker-pen. In a swift movement, she scarred the officer with a thick black streak. It looked like the Mark of Zorro, a zig-zag-zig . . .

  The officer made a pass by the woman’s scarfed head with his open hand, as if to cuff her ear. There was a crackle, and the woman fell, twisting and spasming, to the ceramic tiles.

  “Will you please kindly disperse and clear the square!”

  Shaking and queasy, Stuart got away from the action. The building recognized his temporary tag and automatically opened for him. The doors were tinted, soundproof glass. When they hissed shut, he saw white guards, ungainly like marooned spacemen, tussling with crow-black protestors, but could not hear the kerfuffle.

  Tansey, a tiny girl introduced days ago as a “personal expediter”, greeted him in the foyer. She was eye-candy, a knock-out blonde who decorated New Frontier as a bikini extra decorates a beach party movie. She put a paper cup of decaf in his hand and escorted him to the elevator. She ordered him to have a good time and sent him up to the conference suite.

  There was no table in the conference suite, and few items of furniture recognizable as chairs. Stuart was invited to loll on an inflated beanbag. Electronic equipment towers rose between the cushions, like hookahs in a cyberpunk Arabian Nights. A spherescreen revolved, quietly playing a video clip whose images stuttered along with scratchrap vocals.

  Ray Calme, President of New Frontier, knelt on a karate mat, white robe tented about him. Its thong-laced neckline disclosed a scrub of grey chest hair and a tan, corded throat. On his chest, a penphone, a slimline tabulator and other gizmos hung like a generalissimo’s medal cluster. The company fortune was founded on pictures like Gross and The Cincinatti Flamethrower Holocaust, but New Frontier had climbed to mini-major status with franchises: the Where the Bodies Are Buried horror films and the Raptylz urban youth comedies. Nestled securely in a portfolio of media interests, New Frontier was shooting its wad on hard-edged genre merchandise, to wit: Shadowstalk.

  There were two others: the haggard bikette with an enormous trollcloud of bleached hair was Ellen Jeanette Sheridan, soon to sign as director of Shadowstalk; the fat boy in the one-piece orange skinsuit was Brontis Machulski, the richest teenager Stuart had met since school. Ellen Jeanette had gone from Metalhead promos to a Where the Bodies Are Buried sequel to A-list star vehicles, working with hot comedy and action names. Machulski designed interactive software and had invested his obscene profits by buying into New Frontier (in effect, he was Calme’s boss), developing movie projects to tie in with computer games. Synergy was the watchword: a movie might bomb, but the ancillaries (games, merchandizing, spin-off, cable, laser) could turn over major money.

  While Calme talked script ideas, Machulski tapped keys on a personal note-pad. He could have been making a shopping list or zapping flying saucers for all Stuart knew. Ellen Jeanette sniffled badly as if she had flu coming. On being introduced to Stuart, she’d offered him a demi-squeeze and told him it was important to stay onstreet if he was to keep his creative cojones pumping story sperm. García told him Beverly Hills zonk was so diluted as to be barely illegal.

  Machulski had brought Shadowstalk to New Frontier. Though Stuart had never got up the nerve to raise it, he was sure the kid was also the only person involved who’d read the book rather than glanced at the coverage. Ellen Jeanette refused to read anything: scripts, treatments, contracts and even personal mail had to be recorded on micro-cassettes she could playback through helmetphones while tooling around the Secure Zones on her “hundred thousand dollar hog”, a vintage Harley motorcycle.

  Calme had word of last night’s escapade from his LAPD fixer. When he commiserated with Stuart, Ellen Jeanette perked interest. Stuart haltingly went through the story, trying to balance the onstreet callousness they expected from the author of Shadowstalk with his genuinely conflicted feelings about patrols through the heart of darkness. Much as he hated to say it, he felt it was equipping him to write better, if not this script then the next book.

  “Hung up like meat?” Ellen Jeanette squirmed, “Guh-ross!”

  “I saw that footage on CrimiNews, Channel 187,” Machulski said. “The kid looked like he’d been crucified, with his arms stuck out.”

  Machulski’s arms rose as if he were pretending to be an aeroplane.

  “We should get Zonk War shooting soon, Ray,” Ellen Jeanette told Calme. “Before we’re eclipsed by events. The script is nearly whipped. A few more tweaks, and Muldoon will commit.”

  Muldoon Pezz was a black comedian looking for a serious role. Zonk War was a project Ellen Jeanette was more enthusiastic about than Shadowstalk.

  Calme showed the ad that was going in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, announcing that the project was in development. Stuart thought they’d taken artwork from an old Where the Bodies Are Buried and retouched it to fit his story. Maybe they would retouch his story to fit the art.

  Stuart, almost bursting, asked if anyone had notes on his four page treatment, which they’d all had for three days. Ellen Jeanette pinched her nose and looked out of the panoramic window. Calme admitted his reader hadn’t finished going through the document yet. Machulski pressed a button on his gadget and a tickertape chittered out in a coil. His comments were about the game, which demanded a multiplicity of scenarios, rather than the film, which needed a single plot. One thing about the game business was that no script draft was ever discarded, it simply became another path the player could take through the maze of the story.

  “Know this,” Calme began, “English is a minority language in the Los Angeles school system. I’ve had to send my kids to some rich brat academy so they don’t come home spieling Spanish. I mean, it’s snazz they can talk to the maid, but it’s getting so they can’t talk to me. Sometimes, I feel like the last white man in my neighbourhood.”

  Calme realized what he had said and swallowed. Stuart was fed up with having to speak for an entire race, anyway. The British reviewers had gone on about his blackness, and his publishers tried to make him seem a lot more onstreet than he actually felt. Whenever he was profiled in the press, his parents would chide him for trying to come on like a tough kid from a broken home, battering a word-processor because it was either that or push zonk.

  “It’s what Shadowstalk should have,” Calme continued, recovering. “The sense of threat of the barrio, the way it swallows the city, dragging it down. Like a monster, like a disease. You know now why they call it the Jungle, Stuart. It’s a great image, the jungle getting thicker, growing over everything, everyone. That’s what I love about this project, the chance to say something about the way the city is going. We’re not after Academy Awards, but maybe we can make a difference.”

  “Look,” Ellen Jeanette said, suddenly, “isn’t that pretty?”

  Columns of pink and blue smoke jetted towards the sunscreens and swooped down again like the exhaust trails of an invisible jet. Calme was aghast. He talked into a gizmo.

  “Tansey, shut off the a-c and seal the building. They’re gassing again.”

  Stuart looked out of the window, down at the Square. Everything was blurry and silent. The goons wore snoutlike masks now and were spreading coloured smoke over the protesters, who shook and fell as if speaking in tongues. Millennium people fled, or produced mouth-and-nose breathers from inside robes. Some of t
he protesters were hauled out, twitching but manageable, and piled onto an electric cart like an old-fashioned milkfloat. The large woman with the petition could hold her breath long enough to fight back and had to be stunned with a palm-touch, then have her wrists plastic-noosed behind her back. The petition clipboard probably got lost in the melée.

  “I wish they’d find the goddamned Disappeared and get those harpies off our necks,” Calme said. “It’s the third time this month. There ought to be a law.”

  Stuart’s eyes followed the smoke as it pooled around the writhing protesters, layering pastel over black.

  VIII From the Corrido of Diego

  “Chispa del Oro was like any other mining camp. It was strung out along the banks of a creek, where men, women and children panned for sparkles among the sands.

  “It was an hour before true sun-down. I was at the creek, circling the grit in water, holding my batea up to the light, hoping the last red rays would coax a gleam my eyes had missed. As the moon neared the underside of the horizon, my sight changed. The water swirled heavily, like quicksilver.

  “Fox crept up on Diego. At first, there had been pain with the moonchange. Now I could pull on Fox as easily as one pulls on a cloak. If I concentrated, Diego could resist Fox and pass a moon night in human form, if with considerable discomfort.

  “I had a woman and children, then. At least one of the children, the youngest, was mine. The baby boy’s elder brothers were fathered by a man who had been killed, one of numberless Joaquins. The woman, Julietta, was part-Indian, like almost all of us. She loved Fox but lived with Diego, even became fond of him. She came to me because I killed the men who murdered her true husband. I marked them with my zig-zag-zig.

  “A trickle of gold was coming in and I fed my family. In evenings when there was no moon, I would listen to Julietta play the flute with another woman who played the guitar. This was all a man could want; I wished to grow old and die like others, mourned by my children . . .

  “Diego could almost pretend Fox had fled. Except on moon nights. Mostly, then, I hunted rabbits.

  “One of my son’s brothers pulled at my sleeve and pointed. The creek ran through a valley, washing gold down from the mountains. Up on the lip of the valley were seven white men, five on horses. Chispa del Oro had no problems with anglos. We were too removed from the big strikes, our yield was too meagre. We panned mainly for placer, the thin sand from which gold could be distilled only with more patience and skill than most anglos could summon.

  “With the red of the dying sun behind them, the seven men were shadow figures. But I saw their faces as blobs of gloomy light. I told the boy to fetch a gun. He was barely ten yards from me when a bloody gobbet exploded in the back of his neck. One man had a long rifle, and was a fine shot with it.

  “I stood, howling my rage and felt a push in my chest, the force spinning me off my feet. I dropped my batea and fell backwards into the creek. Water ran all around me, soaking through my clothes, trailing my hair away from my face.

  “The horsemen passed me, cold shadows washing across my face.

  “ ‘Greaser ain’t kilt,’ one said.

  “ ‘I allus has to finish your leavin’s,’ another replied, voice close.

  “A man knelt over me, face upside-down over mine. The glow on his skin was so bright I couldn’t make out his features. A shining blade passed below my chin, cutting. I choked blood out through the hole in my neck.

  “ ‘A clean job, Hendrik,’ the rifleman said. ‘Crick’ll bleed him dry ’fore sun-down.’

  “ ‘Clean and quiet,’ said Hendrik.

  “I lay still, hearing and feeling, unable to move. The current kept open the throat wound. Water streamed in as if through the gills of a fish, gulping out of my mouth.

  “Hendrik stood up and doffed his wide hat. From inside his placket shirt, he produced a hood which he slipped over his head. Ragged scarecrow eyeholes shone like candleflames in the night. All were hooded now, night-riders.

  “ ‘Gotta run them greasers off,’ someone said. ‘They dirty up the crick. Dang Meskins.’

  “The night-riders moved on. In time, I heard more shots, and whoops, and the slow crackle of fire.”

  “The moon rose, and the hole in my throat closed. Fox slipped out of Diego’s wet clothes and padded towards Chispa del Oro.

  “The shacks were ablaze, casting a circle of light. The dead lay in heaps. Fray Juniperro, our gambussino priest, was slumped dead on his knees, bleeding from the gashes in the side of his head. His ears had been cut off. Juan Ochoa, who had fled North from Santa Anna’s soldiers, was several times gutshot and dying slowly. The night-riders had staked out my Julietta and torn her clothes. They took turns to violate her.

  “Fox leaped from the dark and closed daggered fingers in the throat of a man who was holding a firebrand. I threw him at the feet of the others. With a clawed swipe, I stripped a zig-zag-zig of skin from the side of one of the horses, exposing ribs and vitals. The beast neighed and collapsed, gore gouting around my ankles.

  “Pistols were discharged into my chest and I felt mosquito stings. I tore the hooded head off the man who knelt between Julietta’s legs, working with his bowie knife. My woman had been dead for minutes. I crushed the head like a rotten grapefruit.

  “ ‘Well, if it ain’t a weirdwoof,’ Hendrik said, calm.

  “I killed two others and howled, the blood of my kills bubbling in my throat. I had meat scraps between my teeth.

  “One of the night-riders was down on his knees praying and sobbing and tearing at his hood. I grasped his chest with my feet, crushing ribs with my barbs, and I ate out his eyes, chewing through the cloth of his hood.

  “ ‘Look at him feed,’ said Hendrik.

  “Only Hendrik and the man with the rifle still stood. The rifleman was tamping powder in the barrel. His hood was up over his nose, a powderhorn dangled by a string from his mouth. I stood up, flexing my limbs and growling.

  “The rifleman was a cool hand. He got a ball into his weapon and packed it down, then brought the gun up and pointed it at me. I laid a hand on the barrel and held its aperture to my forehead. With my animal’s snarling mouth, I called him an accursed gringo, a killer of women and children, a man with no honour . . .

  “He fired and the ball flattened against my skull. I smelled the singe of my furred face, but felt no pain.

  “The rainbow ecstasy of killing was on me.

  “I made a hole in his head with my thumb, then jammed his powder-horn into the hole and held his head in one of the fires. The explosion was satisfying, scenting the air with burned powder and blood.

  “I dropped the rifleman’s body and looked at Hendrik. He was clapping, slowly.

  “ ‘Savage critter, ain’t ye?’

  “As I bounded towards him, he slipped off his hood. His eyes still glowed, but his skin was rough and dark, angry fur swarming across his face.

  “I must have frozen in the air.

  “ ‘What be matter, fox. Ain’t ye never met a wolf afore?’

  “Hendrik’s mouth was misshaping as teeth crowded out of it. As his body expanded, his clothes split along their seams. Bony knives burst through the fingers of his gloves. I howled and threw myself at him, tearing and gouging and rending. Powerful claws ripped my hide.

  “We fought to the death, only neither of us could die.

  “Hendrik chewed clean through my shoulder until one arm was hanging off on a thread of gristle. I wrestled his jaw free of the skull, yanking it to one side. We both healed within minutes, struggling still.

  “Hendrik was a bigger beast than I, and master of the creature he became. Finally, he bested and humiliated me. He ground my face into dirt soaked with the blood of my woman, and sprayed me with a jet of thick piss. I smelled him on me for years.

  “At sun-up, we both changed. The killing frenzy was gone from me, though daylight disclosed more atrocities done my family and my people. My baby son hung from a post by his ankle.

  “H
endrik and I didn’t talk, but we sat opposite each other in the burned village. I heard the rushing of the stream and the settling of the embers.

  “ ‘I’m sorry for ye, greaser, that I am,’ Hendrik said, before leaving. ‘I’ve got what I’ve got and it’s my way, but you’ve got the curse . . .’

  “Still, I didn’t understand.”

  IX

  “And this baby is the Leveller,” said Muldoon Pezz. “State-of-the-art all-in-one burpgun, grenade launcher and flamethrower. An ideal Riot Weapon.”

  The comedian, whose sculpted hair made his head look like a sugar loaf mountain, hefted the Leveller and posed with it. His arm disappeared entirely inside the weapon. He might be auditioning for Black Terminator.

  Stuart looked into his half-coconut of fruit-filled exotic alcohol as guests oohed and ahhed over the array of gleaming steel deathware. He had thought the guns and knives mounted on the display wall were movie props, but Pezz was eager to explain how real they were.

  “Is that loaded?” gasped Leitizia Six, the coffee-skin starlet. She was stapled into a brief flame-red dress.

  “What the use of a gun that ain’t loaded, child?”

  Pezz shimmie-jerked with his metal partner, hip-thrusting at the girl. He wore a leather codpiece, decorated with a sequinned roaring lion, over a pair of the baggily diaphanous harem pants popular (and costly) this year. He made a dakka-dakka-dakka sound and raked imaginary death at his laughing guests.

  Welcome to the Black Pack, Stuart thought.

  This was the Ethnic Elite: scratchrappers, foulmouth comics, Spike Lee or Wesley Snipes gottabes, colour-coded execs, MC-DJ alpha beta soupers, lower echelon politicos, transvestite TV anchors. Instead of eye candy, the party had chocolate drops, like Leitizia Six. It was impossible not to imagine five earlier Leitizias who hadn’t worked out so well.

  Stuart wandered out of the gun room into a sunken area where a jacuzzi full of young black writer-directors waiting for their first credits passed around a smoky crystal ball. They sucked the ball’s nipples and described projects, competing yarns of how onstreet the hoods they’d left behind were.