The Best New Horror 6

by Stephen Jones

  The wri-dies wore nothing but gold: necklaces, bracelets, armlets, cock-rings, nose-plugs, belts. Extras from a black porn Cleopatra.

  “Homes,” shouted the wri-die of Mama Was a Crack Ho, “get in on the bubbles, man. Anyone can write Shudderslash and get out of the hood has earned bubbles.”

  Stuart wasn’t sure whether the bubbles were in the jacuzzi or the crystal ball. He certainly wouldn’t be comfortable stripping to his Marks & Sparks boxers and hanging with this crowd. His worst teenage experiences had been on a rugby pitch.

  “I’ll take a rain check,” Stuart said, using an expression from his English–American phrase book.

  “Don’t know what yo missing, my man.”

  Back in the gun room (which was where people ended up chatting at this party, rather than the kitchen) Pezz was ranting. When “the next time” came, he’d be onstreet with the Leveller, “protectin my home, my people.”

  Having missed the set-up, Stuart didn’t know whether Pezz would be protecting his people from rioters or cops. One of the wri-dies, who had read a synopsis of Shadowstalk, shoved him in a corner and preached at him for quarter of an hour: Stuart had to change his hero from a cop to a gangsta. “The cop is the natural-born enemy of the black man, Finn. We gotta stop makin cops heroes.”

  The wri-die got sidetracked by a diatribe against all the performers who had sold out to the man by playing cop heroes: Poitier, Whoopi, Murphy, Washington. The wri-die was rapping along to “Cop Killer” when someone reminded him Ice-T played a cop in New Jack City.

  Pezz was weighed down with more weapons. Chocolate drops draped him with guns as if he were a terrorist Christmas Tree. Stuart had seen Pixie Patrol, Pezz’s last hit, and not thought much of it. His catch-phrase was “bitch, fuck that shit!”, also the title of his best-selling comedy CD and scratchrap single. Pezz played a cop in Pixie Patrol; he maliciously thought of mentioning it to the wri-die on the next pass around.

  Now Pezz was completely tooled up – his display case was empty, and he was wearing all his weapons – he wanted to party. One of the girlies, a bald freeway shaved through her hair, climbed up on a stool with an eye-dropper and squeezed fluid-smidgens into both his eyes.

  Stuart didn’t think zonking up a walking armoury was too clever. Pezz yelled encouragement and jiggled his guns, clanking like a junk-cart. Sooner or later, he was going to go off. If he wasn’t too zonked, he’d do it in the yard because this was his house; if he was too zonked, he could afford to replace a ceiling or a wall. Maybe even a guest.

  “Yez hear about the time Muldoon dropped a frag grenade in Mike Ovitz’s swimming pool?” Leitizia asked.

  Leitizia was very friendly whenever Stuart got near. She was the star of the Velvet series of “erotic thrillers”, rated NC-17 on the top shelf at a video store near you. In his blazer pocket, Stuart had Leitizia’s card: it was plastic with a chip set into it that breathed her name and number when caressed.

  Last night: a garage full of dead kids. Now: swimming pools, movie stars. Los Angeles was disorienting. Mood Change City.

  “Stuart Finn?” said a young man with goldwire-rimmed glasses.

  As they shook hands, Stuart realized the young man wore surgeon’s gloves. He’d seen that in the last few days. It was a health fad, ANSC: Absolutely No Skin Contact.

  “Ouesmene Collins,” he said.

  Leitizia’s scarlet-tipped fingers slipped up and down Stuart’s shirt buttons. He had the idea she believed in skin contact.

  “I’m with Reality Programming, Channel 187. CrimiNews. We understand you were at the Obregon Street Crimescene?”

  “Obregon Street?”

  “The garage.”

  Stuart knew where Collins meant.

  “We’re doing a follow-up newsbite, and would like to schedule an interview.”

  Collins spoke in a monotone and had no expression. Stuart thought he was squirmy.

  “I’m afraid I signed a contract with LAPD,” Stuart shrugged. “One of the conditions of my ridealong is that I not discuss anything with the media.”

  “Indeed. But there are ways around contracts.”

  “I’ve another five nights to go,” he said, looking at his watch. “In fact, I should be leaving. The patrol starts at midnight.”

  “There are serious questions about Obregon Street,” Collins continued, intent. “Ryu has stated that there are no concrete suspicions.”

  Something warm and wet slipped into Stuart’s ear. Leitizia’s tongue. He’d waited twenty-three years for this and now had to skip out. Would the Velvet Vulva, as she introduced herself, “take a rain check”?

  “It was the van, surely,” Stuart said. “The men in the van.”

  “What van?”

  “The black van leaving the garage.”

  “There’s no van in the reports.”

  “Ouesmene,” Leitizia purred out of the side of her mouth, “disappear, would you.”

  Collins, still thinking van, vanished.

  “You British guys,” Leitizia said, “you’ve just got it.”

  A tiny thought (shouldn’t have mentioned the van: contract violation) shrivelled in his mind. Other thoughts loomed larger, more pressing.

  “Yo,” shouted Pezz, “Velvet Vulva, all the waayyyy!”

  One of his smaller guns went off, putting a thumb-hole dent in the wall. Everybody laughed.

  Stuart made excuses.

  X From the Corrido of Diego

  “If I could change, others must too. I was not greatly surprised to learn I was not the only creature of my kind. The old stories had come from somewhere. But what Hendrik said about a curse disturbed me greatly. I realized I did not understand my condition. Then again, who among us can say he fully understands his condition?

  “Maybe ten years later, I crossed trails with a wagon train. Its cargo was women: mail order brides for California miners, paid-for wombs to yield a harvest of anglo babies. Many were from far corners of Europe. Irish, German, Dutch, Hungarian. Gypsy, even. Few spoke English, let alone Spanish.

  “For a while, I rode with the wagon-master. It was a harsh trail, across a desert that burned by day and froze by night. There was disease and hardship and privation and accident. As a month passed, I saw a glow growing in the face of one of the trail-hands, who took to what he called ‘breaking in’ the brides. If the wagon-master hadn’t hanged him, I would have killed him.

  “Among the women was a Serbian girl who was also a cat, a big cat. From the first I saw her, I knew she could change. Her monthly cycle and mine did not jibe, so Fox never met Cat. In her centuries, Milena had learned languages; this skill made her special, not her ability to change. She was the interpreter, between the women and the trail-hands, and with whoever we chanced across.

  “I asked Milena what Hendrik had meant by my curse, but she could not help me understand though she thought she understood herself. I knew it was something quite apart from the moon-change, something that marked me as different from the rest of the changing kind.

  “ ‘Men call us the creatures of darkness,’ Milena explained, ‘and they have good reason. Many, perhaps most, of us are like this Hendrik, animals in human skin. Our place is the dark, our strength is the night. But your strength is the moon. The light of the moon is the light of a sun shining back from a silver mirror. You are a creature of the light, perhaps even a prisoner of the light. I hunt where I will, for cats know no rules. The path you walk is narrow and lonely, for you must always hunt the evil in men, must always protect your people. Yet you can never be truly with your people, for you change. I do not envy you, Diego, and yet I accept that you are better than I, perhaps better than us all.’

  “Soon after, I killed a German woman without knowing why. Her face had glowed like a ghost-flame, as sickly and bright as the face of the worst ravager or tyrant I had ever slaughtered. It turned out the woman had stifled two of her children and taken their water rations for herself. During the desert crossing, a dozen women died who might hav
e been saved by a few drops of water.

  “The wagon-master said the woman must have been mauled to death by a mountain lion or a coyote. Gypsies and Hungarians muttered that they knew better. I left the next night, racing off as Fox.

  “Later I heard a tall tale about a wagon train who turned on one of their womenfolk and skinned her alive to prove her hide was furred on the inside.”

  XI

  “Got another high concept, man,” García said. “This cop becomes a Mexican wrestling star, El Demonio Azul, and goes undercover . . .”

  A whining shriek cut through García’s movie idea, the public address system’s way of saying “Listen Up”. The cops in the locker room all looked to the wall-screen. Like all public buildings in LA, the police station had its own interactive TV station, narrowcasting from a top floor studio suite. There were commercials: cop insurance and pension schemes, special bilingual coaching for promotion boards, holiday-camp descriptions of faraway stations that needed personnel to transfer in, new brands of body armour. Then the sergeant of the watch, outlined in frizzy blue against a blurry slo-mo explosion, gave a cop news round-up.

  Mug-shots flashed by. Scotchman paid attention, nodding slightly at each face he recognized. The sergeant downloaded new charges to his patrol teams: some players were climbing, from rape to armed robbery to murder one; others were slipping down the leagues, narco beefs diminishing as they lost territory to the comers.

  “As a result of last night’s Obregon Street incident, the Caldiarres are Off The Board,” the sergeant announced, to general cheers. What looked like home video footage of the garage came on, the camera circling around the hanging boy. Arms outstretched and head hung, he did look as if he had been crucified. A crude computer graphic represented the angry face Stuart had seen on the dead boys’ jackets, and a big black X crossed through it. “This investigation is closed. Chief Ryu has commended the officers on the scene for the speedy mop-up.”

  ID photos of García and Scotchman appeared in an iris, and cops gathered to josh the patrol team.

  “They found the van?” Stuart asked.

  “What van?” García said, fighting off a hug-happy hermano.

  “The black van,” Stuart insisted, feeling dumb. Something about Obregon Street was nagging the edge of his mind. “From last night, remember?”

  “Didn’t see no van, man,” García said, eyes swiveling towards an angling security camera. Its directional mikes could pick up what he was saying, but his face was out of shot. García shook his eyes from side to side.

  Stuart gathered he should drop the subject.

  Plenty of people wore sunglasses at night, especially those who also carried white canes. But this blind girl was waving a snub-nosed pistol. Far less aesthetically stimulating than anything on Muldoon Pezz’s wall, it could still put a dent in a person. García yanked the gun out of her paw and whipped the heavy glasses from the suspect’s eyes. They were red marbles, with tiny yellow irises like pus in pimples.

  This one was far gone, a tertiary zonkbrain.

  The girl’s friends backed off and let the officers make an arrest. They were piling out of a club in the Jungle, having made enough trouble to prompt a call to the cops. Probably, they’d just run out of money and the management dropped the dime to bring round the garbage collectors.

  Through windows as thin as arrow-slits, strobe-lights pulsed. A band named Dire Tribe did a scratchrap take on “Heart Attack and Vine”. A sumo wrestler in combat armour barred the door, watching García and Scotchman take care of business.

  When Scotchman shoved the zonkbrain against the patrol car and pulled disposable cuffs from his belt, the penny dropped. Stuart realized what bothered him about Obregon Street.

  The zonkbrain, mad eyes leaking blood, twisted and kicked out blindly. She wore a ra-ra skirt and combat boots. Scotchman got out of the way of the kick and jabbed his stun-stick into her side. There was a crackle and the smell of ozone. She was so zonked she didn’t feel the charge.

  “The Caldiarre in the garage was cuffed,” Stuart said aloud, recalling the horror-flash image. “His arms were fixed over his head. In the news footage, his arms are loose, stuck out like a scarecrow’s. Someone uncuffed him.”

  “Case closed,” García said. “Don’t think on it, man.”

  García waded in and pummeled the zonkbrain. He took her head by a beaded scalplock and slammed it against the hood of the car. The fight went out of her. Scotchman got his ratcheted plastic noose around the perp’s wrists and pulled tight. It would have to be clipped off with special shears.

  Some clean-up cop must have cut the cuffs in Obregon Street. They were disposable, so they’d been disposed of.

  The zonkbrain’s boyfriend stood back, astonished but not appalled. He seemed to find it all quite entertaining. Struggling with the cuffs, she fell in a fetal ball, leaking foam. The sidewalk where she twitched was patterned with overlapped and faded spray-paint body outlines.

  “Too far gone for detox,” García said as she rolled into a gutter clogged with concaved zonk squeezers, take-out food McLitter, and empty shell cases. Scotchman helped the girl stand and wiped off her mouth.

  The boyfriend laughed and left at a run, taking off with his buddies for the next club. Some night, it would be him dribbling strawberry froth on the sidewalk.

  Why would cops cut the cuffs? Because cuffs meant cops?

  Cops covered cops, that was the first thing Stuart had seen onstreet: Scotchman distracting him while García popped pills. García was right: he shouldn’t think about it, he’d only get his brain hurt.

  A combat ambulance arrived. Zonkbrains fell between offender and casualty, and rated secure hospital facilities. A Paramedic, a Chinese guy in dark coveralls, hit the street.

  “Why the camouflage?” Stuart asked.

  “Whites make too good a target,” the Paramedic said.

  García helped the Paramedic sling the zonkbrain in the back. Scotchman threw her white cane and dark glasses in after her.

  As the ambulance turned a corner, Stuart noticed it was the same model vehicle as the van on Obregon Street, jungle-striped rather than dead black.

  The sumo guardian looked up at the sky, weary shoulders weighted down by armourpads.

  “It’s always like this in the Jungle when the moon is full,” he said. “It gets to their rotted brains. Moonlight is like a drug.”

  “Gone quiet back there, Stuey? What’s going down?”

  Stuart was thinking hard. He couldn’t help it; in his mind, he was putting together a jigsaw. The picture that emerged was scary, but he couldn’t stop himself from fitting in the pieces.

  They were driving down a well-lit strip. There were clubs and allnight shops. Pedestrians wandered onstreet, drifting between cars.

  The banner with the names of the Disappeared of Los Angeles. Cop-issue cuffs on the Caldiarre kid. A garage full of dead zonk dealers. The closed investigation. A van so black it fades into the night.

  There were shots in the night. García sighed.

  Every time Stuart turned on the television in his hotel, Chief Ryu was talking about the War on Zonk. Ryu reminded him of Gomez Addams, a shark-smiling little man in pinstripes. Mayor Jute was always behind the Chief, voting more funds to special Zonk Task Forces.

  Stuart wasn’t thinking Task Force. He was thinking Death Squad.

  “Fuckin’ Jungle,” Scotchman said, hitting the brakes.

  A car was overturned in the street. A couple of kids with guns crouched behind it, dodging and returning fire from a low rooftop.

  A slug spanged against the windscreen, but didn’t shatter the armoured glass. The shot came from the roof faction.

  “Shoot ’em in the brain,” Scotchman muttered, unslinging a pump-action shotgun. He got out of the car, bent low, and ran across the street. García radioed for back-up.

  Scotchman straightened and fired at the roof, not apparently aiming at anything in particular.

  García finished his ca
ll-in.

  “This time, man, stay here. Hollywood can’t afford to lose you. Needs all the talent it can get.”

  García drew his Colt Python and slipped out of the side door.

  García and Scotchman didn’t come back. Stuart heard gunfire, shouts and sirens. The patrol car’s radio crackled, but no messages came through. He shifted on the squeaky seats and thought of the Disappeared, remembering crowd control smoke settling on the protesters in Millennium Plaza.

  If, for some reason Stuart couldn’t fathom, you wanted Millennium Plaza, you had to have the Jungle as well. It was how the city worked. All the folks at Muldoon Pezz’s party were standing on the backs and heads of the onstreet scavengers who scuttled away when the shooting started. If Pezz stepped out into a riot, even toting his precious Leveller, he would last about seven seconds before someone drew a bead on his unprotected hairstyle and pre-empted his last punchline. And Stuart Finn didn’t kid himself he was any fitter to survive out in Darwin City.

  The street was clear now, as if cordoned off to be a movie set. The skirmish had shifted. García and Scotchman must be in pursuit. Everyone else had made a policy decision to get out of the way.

  Stuart had enough background for his script now, and wanted to go home. He could work in Bath and fax the pages to New Frontier. The council might complain about the spare change brigade, but even the rabid right didn’t suggest rounding them up and putting bullets through their eyes.

  A pebble-tap hit the window near his head, startling him. He looked out and saw a black-uniformed cop chest. A gauntleted hand made a beckoning motion.

  Stuart was puzzled, then realized he was invited to get out of the car. He nodded, and pushed the door. It wouldn’t give. There was a green light on the inside handle. Like a London taxi, the rear doors could be locked from the dashboard. To prevent prisoners making a break. Last night, in Obregon Street, the lock hadn’t been on; that was how he had been able to wander into the garage and see what he shouldn’t have seen.