999

by Al Sarrantonio

  John fired again. The bullet struck the pickup truck.

  Running faster, propelled by fear, Romero saw the lights of the house ahead and veered to the left so he wouldn’t be a silhouette. A third shot, a bullet buzzing past him, shattered a window in the house. He stretched his legs to the maximum. His chest heaved. As the house got larger before him, he heard the roar of the pickup truck behind him. I have to get off the lane. He veered farther to the left, scrambled over a rail fence, and raced across a field of chard, his panicked footsteps mashing the tender shoots.

  Headlights gleamed behind him. The truck stopped. A fourth shot broke the silence of the valley. John obviously assumed that in this isolated area there was a good chance a neighbor wouldn’t hear. Or care. Trouble with coyotes.

  A fifth shot stung Romero’s left shoulder. Breathing rapidly and hoarsely, he zigzagged. At the same time, he bent forward, running as fast as he could while staying low. He came to another fence, squirmed between its rails, and rushed into a further field, crushing further crops—radishes, he dimly thought.

  The truck roared closer along the lane.

  Another roar matched it, the roiling power of the Rio Grande as Romero raced nearer. The lights of the house were to his right now. He passed them, reaching the darkness at the back of the farm. The river thundered more loudly.

  Almost there. If I can—

  Headlights glaring, the truck raced to intercept him.

  Another fence. Romero lunged between its rails so forcefully that he banged his injured shoulder, but he didn’t care—moonlight showed him the path to the raised footbridge. He rushed along it, hearing the truck behind him. The churning river reflected the headlights, its fierce whitecaps beckoning. With a shout of triumph, he reached the footbridge. His frantic footsteps rumbled across it. Spray from the river slicked the boards. His feet slipped. The bridge swayed. Water splashed over it. He lost his balance, nearly tumbled into the river, but righted himself. A gunshot whistled past where he had been running before he fell. Abruptly, he was off the bridge, diving behind bushes, scurrying through the darkness on his right. John fired twice toward where Romero had entered the bushes as Romero dove to the ground farther to the right. Desperate not to make noise, he fought to slow his frenzied breathing.

  His throat was raw. His chest ached. He touched his left shoulder and felt cold liquid mixed with warm: water and blood. He shivered. Couldn’t stop shivering. The headlights of the truck showed John walking onto the footbridge. The pistol was in his right hand. Something else was in his left. It suddenly blazed. A powerful flashlight. It scanned the bushes. Romero pressed himself lower to the ground.

  John proceeded across the bridge. “I’ve been counting the same as you have!” he shouted to be heard above the force of the current. “Eight shots! I checked the magazine before I got out of the truck. Seven more rounds, plus one in the firing chamber!”

  Any moment the flashlight’s glare would reach where Romero was hiding. He grabbed a rock, thanked God that it was his left shoulder that had been injured, and used his right arm to hurl the rock. It bounced off the bridge. As Romero scurried farther upriver, John swung the flashlight toward where he had been and fired.

  This time, Romero didn’t stop. Rocks against a pistol weren’t going to work. He might get lucky, but he doubted it. John knew which direction he was in, and whenever Romero risked showing himself to throw another rock, John had a good chance of capturing him in the blaze of the flashlight and shooting him.

  Keep going upriver, he told himself. Keep making John follow. Without aiming, he threw a rock in a high arc toward John but didn’t trick him into firing without a target. Fine, Romero thought, scrambling through the murky bushes. Just as long as he keeps following.

  The raft, he kept thinking. They found my campsite. They found my car.

  But did they find the raft?

  In the darkness, it was hard to get his bearings. There had been a curve in the river, he remembered. Yes. And the ridge on this side angled down toward the water. He scurried fiercely, deliberately making so much noise that John was bound to hear and follow. He’ll think I’m panicking, Romero thought. To add to the illusion, he threw another high arcing rock toward where John was stalking him.

  A branch lanced his face. He didn’t pay any attention. He just rushed onward, realized that the bank was curving, saw the shadow of the ridge angling down to the shore, and searched furiously through the bushes, tripping over the raft, nearly banging his head on one of the rocks that he had put in it to prevent a wind from blowing it away.

  John’s flashlight glinted behind him, probing the bushes.

  Hurry!

  Breathless, Romero took off his jacket, stuffed it with large rocks, set it on the rocks that were already in the raft, and dragged the raft toward the river. Downstream, John heard him and redirected the flashlight, but not before Romero ducked back into the bushes, watching the current suck the raft downstream. In the moonlight and the glint of the flashlight, the bulging jacket looked as if Romero were hunkered down in the raft, hoping not to be shot as the raft sped past.

  John swung toward the river and fired. He fired again, the muzzle flash bright, the gunshots barely audible in the roar of the current, which also muted the noises that Romero made as he charged from the bushes and slammed against John, throwing his injured arm around John’s throat while he used his other hand to grab John’s gun arm.

  The force of hitting John propelled them into the water. Instantly, the current gripped them, its violence as shocking as the cold. John’s face was sucked under. Clinging to him, straining to keep him under, Romero also struggled with the river, its power thrusting him through the darkness. The current heaved him up, then dropped him. The cold was so fierce that already his body was becoming numb. Even so, he kept squeezing John’s throat and struggling to get the pistol away from him. A huge tree limb scraped past. The current upended him. John broke the surface. Romero went under. John’s hands pressed him down. Frenzied, Romero kicked. He thought he heard a scream as John let go of him and he broke to the surface. Five feet away, John fought to stay above the water and aim the pistol. Romero dove under. Hearing the shot, he used the force of the current to add to his effort as he thrust himself farther under water and erupted from the surface to John’s right, grabbing John’s gun arm, twisting it.

  You son of a bitch, Romero thought,. If I’m going to die, you’re going with me. He dragged John under. They slammed against a boulder, the pain making Romero cry out under water. Gasping, he broke to the surface. Saw John ahead of him, aiming. Saw the headlights of the truck illuminating the footbridge. Saw the huge tree limb caught in the narrow space between the river and the bridge. Before John could fire, he slammed into the branch. John collided with it a moment later. Trapped in its arms, squeezed by the current, Romero reached for the pistol as John aimed it point-blank. Then John’s face twisted into surprised agony as a boulder crashed down on him from the bridge and split his skull open.

  Romero was barely aware of Matthew above him on the footbridge. He was too paralyzed with horror, watching blood stream down John’s face. An instant later, a log hurtled along the river, struck John, and drove him harder against the tree branch. In the glare of the headlights, Romero thought he saw wood protruding from John’s chest as he, the branch, and the log broke free of the bridge and swirled away in the current. Thrust along with him, Romero stretched his arms up, trying to claw at the bridge. He failed. Speeding under it, reaching the other side, he tensed in apprehension of the boulder that he would bang against and be knocked unconscious by when something snagged him. Hands. Matthew was on his stomach on the bridge, stretching as far down as he could, clutching Romero’s shirt. Romero struggled to help him, trying not to look at Matthew’s crushed forehead and right eye from where Romero had hit him with the rock. Gripping Matthew’s arms, pulling himself up, Romero felt debris crash past his legs, and then he and Matthew were flat on the footbridge, breathing hoars
ely, trying to stop trembling.

  “I hate him,” Matthew said.

  For a moment, Romero was certain that his ears were playing tricks on him, that the gunshots and the roar of the water were making him hear sounds that weren’t there.

  “I hate him,” Matthew repeated.

  “My God, you can talk.”

  For the first time in twelve years, he later found out.

  “I hate him,” Matthew said. “Hatehimhatehimhatehimhatehim.”

  Relieving the pressure of silence that had built up for almost two thirds of his life, Matthew gibbered while they went to check Mark and found him dead, while they went to the house and Romero phoned the state police, while they put on warm clothes and Romero did what he could for Matthew’s injury and they waited for the police to arrive, while the sun rose and the investigators swarmed throughout the farm. Matthew’s hysterical litany became ever more speedy and shrill until a physician finally had to sedate him and he was taken away in an ambulance.

  The state trooper whom Romero had asked for backup was part of the team. When Romero’s police chief and sergeant heard what had happened, they drove up from Santa Fe. By then the excavations had started, and the bodies were showing up. What was left of them, anyway, after their blood had been drained into the fields and they’d been cut into pieces.

  “Good God, how many?” the state trooper exclaimed as more and more body parts, most in extreme stages of decay, were found under the fields.

  “As long as Matthew can remember, it’s been happening,” Romero said. “His mother died giving him birth. She’s under one of the fields. The father died from a heart attack three years ago. They never told anybody. They just buried him out there someplace. Every year on the last average frost date, May fifteenth, they’ve sacrificed someone. Most of the time it was a homeless person, no one to be missed. But last year it was Susan Crowell and her fiancé. They had the bad luck of getting a flat tire right outside the farm. They walked down here and asked to use a phone. When John saw the out-of-state license plate …”

  “But why?” the police chief asked in dismay as more body parts were discovered.

  “To give life to the earth. That’s what the D. H. Lawrence story was about. The fertility of the earth and the passage of the seasons. I guess that’s as close as John was able to come to explaining to his victims why they had to die.”

  “What about the shoes?” the police chief asked. “I don’t understand about the shoes.”

  “Luke dropped them.”

  “The fourth brother?”

  “That’s right. He’s out there somewhere. He committed suicide.”

  The police chief looked sick.

  “Throughout the spring, until the vegetables were ready for sale, Luke drove back and forth from the farm to Santa Fe to sell moss rocks. Each day, he drove along Old Pecos Trail. Twice a day, he passed the Baptist church. He was as psychologically tortured as Matthew, but John never suspected how close he was to cracking. That church became Luke’s attempt for absolution. One day, he saw old shoes on the road next to the church.”

  “You mean he didn’t drop the first ones?”

  “No, they were somebody’s idea of a prank. But they gave him an idea. He saw them as a sign from God. Two years ago, he started dropping the shoes of the victims. They’d always been a problem. Clothes will decay readily enough. But shoes take a lot longer. John told him to throw them in the trash somewhere in Santa Fe. Luke couldn’t bring himself to do that any more than he could bring himself to go into the church and pray for his soul. But he could drop the shoes outside the church in the hopes that he’d be forgiven and that the family’s victims would be granted salvation.”

  “And the next year, he dropped shoes with feet in them,” the sergeant said.

  “John had no idea that he’d taken them. When he heard what had happened, he kept him a prisoner here. One morning, Luke broke out, went into one of the fields, knelt down, and slit his throat from ear to ear.”

  The group became silent. In the background, amid a pile of upturned rich black soil, someone shouted that they’d found more body parts.

  * * *

  Romero was given paid sick leave. He saw a psychiatrist once a week for four years. On those occasions when people announced that they were vegetarians, he answered, “Yeah, I used to be one, but now I’m a carnivore.” Of course, he couldn’t subsist on meat alone. The human body required the vitamins and minerals that vegetables provided, and although Romero tried vitamin pills as a substitution, he found that he couldn’t do without the bulk that vegetables provided. So he grudgingly ate them, but never without thinking of those delicious, incredibly large, shiny, healthy-looking tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, cabbage, beans, peas, carrots, and chard that the Parsons brothers had sold. Remembering what had fertilized them, he chewed and chewed, but the vegetables always stuck in his throat.

  Peter Schneider

  DES SAUCISSES, SANS DOUTE

  If you don’t have a sense of humor, I strongly suggest you skip this next piece. As I said in the introduction to Chet Williamson’s story earlier in this volume, horror and humor are strangely and strongly attracted to one another—and you may never find a better example of it than what follows. “Des Saucisses, Sans Doute” is a telling, hilarious, and possibly sick (in the tradition of The National Lampoon) parody, and manages, in a faux introductory headnote and the very short “story” which follows it by the imaginary author Pamela Jergens, to effectively skewer everything we hold sacred and serious in this field.

  Peter Schneider’s writing resume is not as long as it should be, but his publishing one is longer than your leg. He’s been a marketing executive at some of the major publishing houses in New York City, as well as the founder of Hill House Books, which produced a stellar edition of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, which is still considered one of the finest private editions of its time.

  As I warned, if you don’t know how to laugh don’t read this piece—but if you do, prepare to laugh out loud The fancy and ominous-sounding French title, by the way, translates as “The Hot Dogs, Without Doubt.”

  Pamela Jergens

  DES SAUCISSES, SANS DOUTE

  Pamela Jergens is one of our new breed of writers of le horreur, as I like to call it. She’s had a number of stories published in Dead ‘Uns, Lc Journale de Mort, and Cry Like a Baby … A Dead Baby. She’s also the author of the “Fiendish Funsters,” a horror-based young adult series published by Blood Press. Pamela proclaims, “I truly have two lives—my normal, average American life as a professional businesswoman … and my other life, where I live out on the word processor the dark fantasies that come to me, almost unbidden. There is a strict dichotomy between my two lives—one does not encroach on the other. If they did, I would lose touch with who I am … and what I want to be.” In her other, normal, average American life Pamela conducts a high-powered career as a magazine editor (for such journals as Cry Like a Baby … A Dead Baby, Dead ‘Uns, and Le Journale de Mort). She also serves as the publisher and CEO of Blood Press. “I disdain the recent works of the so-called splatterpunks,” says Pamela. “My work is instead the matériel of the night … of the dark places that live within us, expressed through only the subtlest of metaphors and signals … where the true horror may be within ourselves, not in the ravings of werewolves or vampires. I feel my work is in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Max Shulman—the “quiet” horror of Rapaccini’s Daughter or Dobie Gillis—the horror, indeed, of ourselves.” And here you can just imagine the authoress tapping herself on the temple. So now, for those of you in a contemplative and inner-examining mood, is “Des Saucisses, Sans Doute.”

  I brandished the severed left tit of the blond chick in one hand. It had not been a clean cut—Momma never got me braces when I was growing up.

  She lay, cowering and crying, in the corner of the room, the front of her fabulous bod smeared with blood and offal.

  “Hey, baby,” I crowed as I picked
up her D-cup bra. “Let’s play David and Goliath.” I plopped the moist handful of tissue into the left cup and swirled the entire contraption around my head, until finally it let go of its grisly burden, which flew, arrow-like, across the room, only to land on the far wall with a hideous groooop, leaving a trail not unlike a snail, only bloodier, as it made its way down the plasterboard of the wall. The pale brown nipple detached itself and fell to the hardwood floor with a faint plumph.

  She cried harder and harder, and buried her face in her hands.

  I thought back to a few hours before, when I had met Donnalie in the pub down the street from my apartment. She was not beautiful in the classic sense. Her hideous cleft palate, her wandering left eye, and her nose, eaten away by tertiary syphilis … all flaws in and of themselves, yet together they made her look noble, like a mare roaming the hills of Loch Lomond, wind blowing her mane in a tangle of uproarious curls. After a few minutes of conversation, we left for the warmth … and promised brandies … of my inexpensive apartment over the Jibblesworth store. And now, I found myself in a situation that defied even the farthest reaches of a maniac’s mind. It had suited with a kiss … and ended with a kitchen knife.

  Suddenly my tongue shot out of my mouth, enlarging at a rapid rate and splitting into a tempered steel fork. I strode over to Donnalie, my protruding tongue now six feet in length and hard as granite. “Lookth at this,” I lisped, as my abnormally prehensile tongue stabbed down onto her legs. Over and over the forked tongue fell, until finally her legs gave way at the knees. I keened in delight as I grabbed the severed limbs. Reaching around and grabbing two extension cords from the wall, I feverishly lashed the limbs to my own legs, making sure that the feet extended a good six inches beyond my own. Clambering to my “feet,” I stumbled across the room, roaring with laughter. “Look, Donnalie, I don’t need elevator shoes … I got elevator feets!” (My height—only 5’3” at maturity—had always been an issue in my psyche.) Mercifully, however, Donnalie had fainted dead away.