by Holly Black
I yanked my hand free from the lady guard, and ran past the ambulances. I heard people shouting behind, but I kept on running. I ran as fast as I could across the parking lot, and across the highway. A car honked at me. There was a field on the other side of the highway. I ran through the high corn. The edges of the leaves cut my arms and my face as I ran. At the end of the field there were woods, and I ran into them.
When I came to a creek, Howie showed me how to take off my shoes and socks and wade downstream to confuse the dogs. The water was cold, and the stones were hard and slippery. After a long time the stream came to a culvert. I got out on the other side, put my shoes back on, and climbed up to the road above the culvert. A couple of cars came by before one stopped, and the man gave me a ride.
Tell him to stop, Howie says, eat him up, get his money.
Don’t do that, mom says, it isn’t right.
Nothing’s right or wrong any more, dad says. The world’s gone crazy, he says.
Don’t do it, Jake says, someone will find him soon, it’ll be a point the police can track you from.
I know a place we can go, Howie says. Jake and Howie and mom talk a long time. Yeah, Jake says finally, it’ll do. Howie tells me where to have the man let me out of the car.
In the woods by the road there was a path. After walking for a long time, I found some people under a railroad bridge. Most were grownup men, but there were also some boys older than me. They were really dirty. “Hey, who’s the baby,” they said. “What’cha doing, out here without your mommy?” They were cooking in a can hanging over fire. I was really hungry, and they gave me some beans and syrup. They asked me where I came from. I told them about dad, and mom, and the birds, and the prison. “Crazy shit,” one boy said. After they finished eating, they were drinking. They gave me some in a plastic coffee cup, but it burned my mouth and my nose and I didn’t like it. One boy was smoking from a glass straw. He said I should try some.
Howie and Jake say it’ll probably be safe here for a few days, but then I’ll have to move on.
I don’t know what to do about dad. He won’t help. He won’t talk to me, or the others. He just complains. I told him I might get rid of him. Mom begged me not to, so I didn’t. For now.
My face still hurts. I wish dad hadn’t hit me.
Mom, Howie, Jake, Kaysha, they all help me plan what to do next. It’ll be tough at first, everyone says, because people don’t like to see a kid running around without parents.
When I get older, they say, things will be easier. There are people I can learn a lot from. People in banks. People in government. Scientists. Generals. I could read in the smartest people in the world. I could have them all inside me.
But meanwhile, we have to be careful, they say. We have to keep moving. We have to keep out of sight. We have to hide.
That’s okay. I’m good at hiding. You can learn a lot from a cockroach.
Princess of the Night
Michael Kelly
Warren heard it, quite plainly, outside his front door; a faint stirring, a sigh, a melancholy moan. He waited … waited … but no knock came. Then another sound, like shuffling feet.
Warren groaned, dropped the magazine, and lifted his tired bones from the rocker. He shuffled over to the door and pulled it open.
“Trick or treat.”
Warren looked down, puzzled. The first thing he noticed about her was the scar: a livid line that zigzagged from the corner of her mouth to her earlobe. In the wan light of the full moon it pulsed, as if alive. She was a wee pale thing with fine blond hair and cool blue eyes that gazed flatly at him. Couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, Warren thought. She was dressed in a purple robe, trimmed in gold. A tiara sat on her head. A little princess. She clutched an orange plastic pumpkin that grinned blackly.
Dead leaves skittered on the porch. The wind rushed in, carrying a touch of frost. It smelled like earth and worms and rain. It snatched at his sweater, the wind. It swirled around him, whispering secrets only he knew.
Warren breathed deeply. Burning leaves and peppermint rain. Autumn! A half-smile creased his face. Once—long, long ago—he’d been an autumn person. Once, long ago, he’d been a man who’d smiled.
“Trick or treat.” Her voice was an autumn voice, a voice of fog and rain and green mystery. And Warren hadn’t seen her mouth move.
Warren sighed. He hadn’t left the porch light on, hadn’t left a Jack-O-Lantern in the window. Didn’t they know he never celebrated Halloween? He hadn’t celebrated Halloween in a very long time, not since … since … Why were they knocking at his door? Then he remembered that there hadn’t actually been a knock. And another memory came bubbling to the surface, one that had lain hidden like a dark stone in a cool riverbed: wet and foggy night; a sudden blur of blond hair; hiss of tires: a faint thump; and Warren—before driving away—watching through the rain-blurred window as a plastic pumpkin bumped and rolled down the dark, almost empty street.
“Trick or treat.” Her voice was an autumn voice—dead leaves, rich earth, and green menace.
Warren shuddered, took a step back. Though her mouth didn’t move, Warren heard a sigh, a miserable moan. And as the little princess took a slow step forward, one dim thought entered Warren’s head: It wasn’t Halloween.
Duck Hunt
Joe R. Lansdale
There were three hunters and three dogs. The hunters had shiny shotguns, warm clothes, and plenty of ammo. The dogs were each covered in big, blue spots and were sleek and glossy and ready to run. No duck was safe.
The hunters were Clyde Barrow, James Clover, and little Freddie Clover, who was only fifteen and very excited to be asked along. However, Freddie did not really want to see a duck, let alone shoot one. He had never killed anything but a sparrow with his BB gun and that had made him sick. But he was nine then. Now he was ready to be a man. His father told him so.
With this hunt he felt he had become part of a secret organization. One that smelled of tobacco smoke and whiskey breath; sounded of swear words, talk about how good certain women were, the range and velocity of rifles and shotguns, the edges of hunting knives, the best caps and earflaps for winter hunting.
In Mud Creek the hunt made the man.
Since Freddie was nine he had watched with more than casual interest, how when a boy turned fifteen in Mud Creek, he would be invited to the Hunting Club for a talk with the men. Next step was a hunt, and when the boy returned he was a boy no longer. He talked deep, walked sure, had whiskers bristling on his chin, and could take up with the assurance of not being laughed at, cussing, smoking, and watching women’s butts as a matter of course.
Freddie wanted to be a man too. He had pimples, no pubic hair to speak of (he always showered quickly at school to escape derisive remarks about the size of his equipment and the thickness of his foliage), scrawny legs, and little, gray, watery eyes that looked like ugly planets spinning in white space.
And truth was, Freddie preferred a book to a gun.
But came the day when Freddie turned fifteen and his father came home from the Club, smoke and whiskey smell clinging to him like a hungry tick, his face slightly dark with beard and tired-looking from all-night poker.
He came into Freddie’s room, marched over to the bed where Freddie was reading Thor, clutched the comic from his son’s hands, sent it fluttering across the room with a rainbow of comic panels.
“Nose out of a book,” his father said. “Time to join the Club.”
Freddie went to the Club, heard the men talk ducks, guns, the way the smoke and blood smelled on cool morning breezes. They told him the kill was the measure of a man. They showed him heads on the wall. They told him to go home with his father and come back tomorrow bright and early, ready for his first hunt.
His father took Freddie downtown and bought him a flannel shirt (black and red), a thick jacket (fleece lined), a cap (with earflaps), and boots (waterproof). He took Freddie home and took a shotgun down from the rack, gave him a box
of ammo, walked him out back to the firing range, and made him practice while he told his son about hunts and the war and about how men and ducks died much the same.
Next morning before the sun was up, Freddie and his father had breakfast. Freddie’s mother did not eat with them. Freddie did not ask why. They met Clyde over at the Club and rode in his jeep down dirt roads, clay roads and trails, through brush and briars until they came to a mass of reeds and cattails that grew thick and tall as Japanese bamboo.
They got out and walked. As they walked, pushing aside the reeds and cattails, the ground beneath their feet turned marshy. The dogs ran ahead.
When the sun was two hours up, they came to a bit of a clearing in the reeds, and beyond them Freddie could see the break-your-heart blue of a shiny lake. Above the lake, coasting down, he saw a duck. He watched it sail out of sight.
“Well, boy?” Freddie’s father said.
“It’s beautiful,” Freddie said.
“Beautiful, hell, are you ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
On they walked, the dogs way ahead now, and finally they stood within ten feet of the lake. Freddie was about to squat down into hiding as he had heard of others doing, when a flock of ducks burst up from a mass of reeds in the lake and Freddie, fighting off the sinking feeling in his stomach, tracked them with the barrel of the shotgun, knowing what he must do to be a man.
His father’s hand clamped over the barrel and pushed it down. “Not yet,” he said.
“Huh?” said Freddie.
“It’s not the ducks that do it,” Clyde said.
Freddie watched as Clyde and his father turned their heads to the right, to where the dogs were pointing noses, forward, paws upraised—to a thatch of underbrush. Clyde and his father made quick commands to the dogs to stay, then they led Freddie into the brush, through a twisting maze of briars and out into a clearing where all the members of the Hunting Club were waiting.
In the center of the clearing was a gigantic duck decoy. It looked ancient and there were symbols carved all over it. Freddie could not tell if it were made of clay, iron, or wood. The back of it was scooped out, gravy bowl-like, and there was a pole in the center of the indention; tied to the pole was a skinny man. His head had been caked over with red mud and there were duck feathers sticking in it, making it look like some kind of funny cap. There was a ridiculous, wooden duck bill held to his head by thick elastic straps. Stuck to his butt was a duster of duck feathers. There was a sign around his neck that read DUCK.
The man’s eyes were wide with fright and he was trying to say or scream something, but the bill had been fastened in such a way he couldn’t make any more than a mumble.
Freddie felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. “Do it,” he said. “He ain’t nobody to anybody we know. Be a man.”
“Do it! Do it! Do it!” came the cry from the Hunting Club.
Freddie felt the cold air turn into a hard ball in his throat. His scrawny legs shook. He looked at his father and the Hunting Club. They all looked tough, hard, and masculine.
“Want to be a titty baby all your life?” his father said.
That put steel in Freddie’s bones. He cleared his eyes with the back of his sleeve and steadied the barrel on the derelict’s duck’s head.
“Do it!” came the cry. “Do it! Do it! Do it!”
At that instant he pulled the trigger. A cheer went up from the Hunting Club, and out of the clear, cold sky, a dark blue norther blew in and with it came a flock of ducks. The ducks lit on the great idol and on the derelict. Some of them dipped their bills in the derelict’s wetness.
When the decoy and the derelict were covered in ducks, all of the Hunting Club lifted their guns and began to fire.
The air became full of smoke, pellets, blood, and floating feathers.
When the gunfire died down and the ducks died out, the Hunting Club went forward and bent over the decoy, did what they had to do. Their smiles were red when they lifted their heads. They wiped their mouths gruffly on the backs of their sleeves and gathered ducks into hunting bags until they bulged. There were still many carcasses lying about.
Fred’s father gave him a cigarette. Clyde lit it.
“Good shooting, son,” Fred’s father said and clapped him manfully on the back.
“Yeah,” said Fred, scratching his crotch, “got that sonofabitch right between the eyes, pretty as a picture.”
They all laughed.
The sky went lighter, and the blue norther that was rustling the reeds and whipping feathers about blew up and out and away in an instant. As the men walked away from there, talking deep, walking sure, whiskers bristling on all their chins, they promised that tonight they would get Fred a woman.
The Choir
Joel D. Lane
The Rat Burglar was the start of it, I suppose. Creeping through open windows in the stillness of late summer, while people were asleep or in the next room. Couldn’t have been older than nine. A few people saw him, but he was too quick for them. Got away with jewellery boxes, phones, wallets. One woman saw only the light of his tiny torch nosing around the bedroom. She thought she was dreaming, but in the morning her purse was gone.
There were worse crimes after that. Someone smashed the back window of a teacher’s car in a primary school playground and emptied a bag of rotten meat over the seats. In another school, dead mice kept turning up in teachers’ handbags. And one evening, young kids in masks swarmed into a newsagent’s and robbed him at knifepoint. He said their leader’s voice hadn’t even broken. Worst of all, a ten-year-old girl whose parents were being arrested for drug dealing clawed a police officer’s face with bleach under her fingernails. He lost his sight.
It was as if the younger generation had declared war on us. Not teenagers, that’s only to be expected, but the kind of little creatures our local paper was more used to calling innocent. What the police couldn’t find was any sign of an adult gang using kids in an organised way for theft or drug-running. They were freelance. We ran a feature on the city’s “feral children,” though I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. Kids raised by wolves were supposed to have built a city, not torn one down.
We got a few of the usual idiot letters blaming the offences on recent cuts in family benefits and social services. Apparently some government department had said we had the worst child welfare record of any major city, as if that meant anything. Our editorials (which I usually wrote) took a clear line: it was the whole culture of “support,” of living cap in hand, that was to blame for these sickening crimes. If people relied on themselves, they’d turn out honest. We called for a level of discipline that matched the nature of the offenders.
A week later, I got an e-mail from a police contact saying This might interest you. There was a link to a local blog called Newtown Crier. The anonymous writer had been ranting for weeks about juvenile crime, calling for the sterilisation of single mothers and the banning of interracial marriage. Neither of which ideas we were likely to touch with a barge-pole, thank you. But that day, he’d posted a short message: The feral children are getting under the radar of police—but now they’d better watch out. The Chosen Few are on their trail. No taller, no older—but better armed and with right on their side. Make no mistake, they will win.
I replied to my contact, asking: Is he talking about some kind of child militia? He didn’t reply at once. Then, after a few days when the level of juvenile crime seemed higher than ever, he invited me to a “press conference” at the Steelhouse Lane police station. That was his code for an exclusive story. These days I rarely leave the office—there’s more information online than on the streets, and the paper’s staff is barely a tenth of what it was in the old days—but something told me this was not one to miss. Though autumn had just given way to the bitter nights of winter.
The station was nested among the gaunt brick buildings of the old hospital, some crusted with scaffolding. Inside, it was barely warmer. My contact—I’ll call him Ian, though I nev
er knew his first name—led me down a narrow concrete staircase to a corridor whose floor-tiles gleamed with moisture. The doors, which were all shut, had spy-holes. He stopped at the last one. “Meet the Chosen Few,” he said quietly to me before unlocking the heavy door. A group of some fifteen children were standing inside. They were all dressed in white, like a choir. White ceramic masks covered their upper faces, but even so I was sure none of them could be over twelve years old.
That impression was confirmed when they began to sing, or rather chant. Their untrained voices had a shrill purity that put my teeth on edge. It was like the sound made by striking a wineglass with a tuning fork. But in such a limited space, and with so many children, it could have been a whole pub’s worth of wineglasses. I had no idea what they were singing or in what language. Some of them were holding coshes, some handcuffs or lengths of rope. I couldn’t see any adult in charge of them. There was something in their eyes, a kind of calm directness, that made me wish they couldn’t see me.
“Take a picture,” Ian said, sounding annoyed that I hadn’t done so. I whipped out my digital camera, focused it and took three hasty shots. The singing ceased. Ian yanked me back out of the cell and slammed the door. “There’s your front page,” he said as we walked back to the ground floor. There was no sound from any cell we passed.
“I need more than that,” I complained. “Where are they from, what are they trained for, and why do—”
“You don’t need any of that. Just publish the photo. What they do, you’ll find out soon enough.” He walked me briskly to the exit and patted my arm. “Watch yourself out there.”
The streets were blurred with mist. I hurried back to my car. Could have done with a drink, but for some reason I didn’t feel very safe. Instead, I drove to the Mercury office and started working on the story. There was only me and the website girl there. Sometimes I flirted with her, but that night I knew I’d want more, so left her alone. Back at my desk I checked the Newtown Crier blog again, but the only update was a single quotation: “Virtue without terror is ineffective.” —Robespierre.
