by Watts, Peter
He spent his evenings in the sunroom with an old family photo clutched to his chest and watched Rachel’s roses miraculously—and rapidly—bloom in the narrow space her garden had once graced. His eyes filled with joyful tears.
This was more, so much more, than promised. Far more than he’d dreamed. Although the growth defied logic—not a single drop of water was used to yield this fruitful bounty—he didn’t care.
Logic told him long ago to set course for Rigel, as so many others had, and he’d ignored it. Logic was useless; it was the way of math and language and science. What he was experiencing was so much more important.
This was spiritual.
One day, tired of electronic-Rachel replying to his out-loud ruminations, he deactivated the house’s communication circuit. She was alive in his mind’s eye, and he could almost see her tending the garden again. Could almost see the curvaceous outline of her form through her sundress. Could almost smell her Channel No. 5, and the secret, feminine fragrances—the more powerful aphrodisiacs—that hung under her store-bought allure.
At night, when the temperatures cooled below one-twenty, Chance rolled around in the grass. He breathed deeply the sweet fragrance of Rachel’s roses, as well as the lilacs and peonies that had started to bloom around the house, and he imagined he was young again, holding his new wife close, wrestling playfully with her in the yard.
He felt more than alive.
He felt immortal.
Two weeks after Evergreen was applied, Chance noticed other unexpected changes that went far beyond feeling younger. Every morning in the mirror, he was younger. Just as grass had returned to the yard, hair returned to his once barren head. Wrinkles faded. Aches and pains all but retreated. Gray gave way to brown. Teeth whitened. Nose and ear hairs receded. Waste flowed without protest. And morning boners returned with a vengeance.
Within a month, he looked and felt like a twenty-five year old man.
Then, one morning, the most incredible thing happened. When the sunroom shutters opened, Rachel stood in the backyard clothed in her favorite sundress, which fluttered gracefully in the hot dawn breeze.
He stared at her, shocked beyond reason. When she stared back at him, deep and abiding love in her soft emerald eyes, shock vanished and joy danced with every molecule of Chance Freeman’s existence.
He opened the door to her.
“May I come in?” she asked.
“Rachel?”
“Yes,” she said, tears brimming in her eyes as they were in his. “I’m home.”
“Rachel?” He held his arms out to her.
“May I come in?” she repeated.
He began weeping. “Is it really you?” He made a move toward her, but she held up a halting hand.
“It’s very hot out here,” she said, “you shouldn’t come out; I should come in. May I…may I come in?”
“Of course,” he sobbed. “Of course. Please, this is your home. Come inside. Come inside.”
As soon as she entered the house, he threw his arms around her. “Where did you go?” he cried. “What happened?”
“Are you satisfied?” she asked coldly.
“What?”
“Are you satisfied?”
“Of course, of course I am. I’m overjoyed. But, but…what happened to you?”
She didn’t respond with words; rather, with her sharp long fangs sank deep into his neck. Pain burned trails through his head, and he knew in his dying moment, watching the opulent greens and reds of his backyard fade to brown, feeling his wife’s soft body transform into something hard and alien, that this was no reunion.
It was a cruel game of predator and prey, and he wouldn’t let them win. Wouldn’t let them shatter all hope. Somehow, perhaps by virtue of the same psychic link that had fooled him, he knew his lifeforce would taste sweeter if he surrendered the lie completely.
He closed his eyes, pretended the thing in his arms really was Rachel, and waited for death.
5.
“So run this by me again, Mr. Zellman,” Detective Saunders said. “How exactly did you know the victim?”
“Like I told you,” Nigel said in a quivering voice, “I didn’t. He called me some time back about treating his lawn, but my daughter fell ill and I wasn’t able to make it up to Duluth for our appointment. When I was able to return to my professional responsibilities, I tried to follow up with Mr. Freeman, but I couldn’t reach him. The recordings all said his communication links were temporarily out of service. I was in the area this morning, calling on another client, so I swung by. His backdoor was open and…I found him…found him just like he is…a husk…a, a shell.”
The detective shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense. None of this makes—”
“I swear,” Zellman pleaded.
“Calm down, Mr. Z,” the detective said. “I’m not saying you did anything wrong. This is the fourth case like this I’ve seen in the last month.”
“Really? But I haven’t—”
“It’s been kept out of the papers for now, at the insistence of the governments of Rigel, and I must warn you keep your mouth shut. They don’t want to start a planet-wide panic—that’s their official position—but they think it has something to do with a virus. They want us instead to double our immigration efforts. Damn fine of them to do this considering the potential for contamination, but who are we to question our saviors. I’m only telling you these things because…well, you seem like a good man, and I would strongly recommend you to take your family and get off this dying rock as fast as you can.”
“No,” Zellman choked. “I won’t leave.”
“Do it for your daughter,” the detective said. “Her sickness was due to the heat, wasn’t it?”
The salesman nodded glumly.
“See it all the time, Mr. Z. Kids need to play outside without getting sick, without falling down dead.”
“I understand. I agree. But…but we won’t be leaving.”
“Why. My family is scheduled to immigrate two weeks from tomorrow. It’s perfectly—”
“No,” Zellman insisted. “Don’t go.”
“What do you know that you’re not telling me, Mr. Z?”
“Have you ever met a Rigelian?”
“Of course not. No.”
“Well, I have, and I don’t trust them. Take it from a natural born salesman. I know when someone, even something, is selling a false bill of goods. And I know when I look in a man’s eye who I’m dealing with. It’s a gift. Maybe a curse. These creatures, they’re cagey. They like to play games.”
Saunders threw Zellman a dismissive wave. “Listen to yourself. You sound like one of those revolutionary nuts in the days of first contact.”
“I think they were right,” Zellman said. “The revolutionaries, I mean. I’ve denied it for a long time, but I think they were right not to trust the Rigelians. Please, don’t take your family to Rigel.”
“I’ve had family and friends immigrate already, Mr. Z.”
“As have I. We all have.”
“I talk to my brother almost every day through interstellar-com. Everyone there is fine. Hell, they’ve never been happier.”
“Look in their eyes, Detective. Listen closely to their words. Think of all their quirks, the things that made them human, then ask yourself if you see those odd, almost imperceptible features articulated now. Like me, observation is your specialty, understanding people, body language. Our goals are different, of course, but the psychology is the same.”
Worry swept the detective’s face. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the immigrants are all dead. That the…the communications are all…they’re all A.I. facades. And if I’m right, though I pray I’m not, the Rigelians are some kind of…of vampires.”
“Vampires?” the detective bellowed, worry replaced by an incredulous look. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Zellman said in a defeated voice. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Go
home, Mr. Z. Give your daughter a big hug. Then get some rest. You need it.”
Nigel Zellman turned away from the detective and stared into the blood-red sky through the windows of Chance Freeman’s sunroom.
He thought about his family.
And he wept.
A Pushcart Prize nominee and an active member of the Horror Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers, Peter Giglio is the author of five novels and four novellas. His works of short fiction can be found in a number of notable volumes, including two comprehensive genre anthologies edited by New York Times Bestselling author John Skipp. With Scott Bradley, Peter wrote the author-approved screen adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale's "The Night They Missed the Horror Show," and an established screenwriting team in Los Angeles holds the film option on Giglio's Sunfall Manor. Peter's next novel, Lesser Creatures, will be released in December by DarkFuse.
WELCOME TO THE REPTILE HOUSE
Stephen Graham Jones
It didn’t start the way you might think.
This is where I kind of pause, look off, bite my lip into my mouth so I can come up with the next big lie. With what my dad, talking loud for my little sister, would call Jamie Boy’s next big excuse.
Let me try it again: it started pretty much exactly the way you’d think a thing like this would get going.
I was twenty-two, still flashing my high-school diploma at job interviews. Still doing stuff like stealing an extra bag of ice from the cooler if the clerk’s not eyeballing me. Hiding a litter of mismatched puppies for the weekend for my friend Dell, and not asking any questions. Bumming smokes outside the bars, but sometimes having my own pack.
I was just getting into tattoos, too. Not on me—my arms had been choked blue not four months after I moved into my own place—but from me. That was the idea, anyway. I wasn’t officially apprenticing anywhere, and nobody’d offered their skin to me yet, but I’d always been drawing. My notebooks from junior high are like a running autobiography in doodles, and I’d worked one summer applying decals and pinstriping at my uncle’s bodyshop, and finally graduated to window tint before he trusted me with the front-door keys.
He should have known better.
But, tats, they were kind of the same as those junior high notebooks. They were the one thing I could concentrate on. Just for hours. Planning, sketching, tracing. For now I was practicing on the back of my right calf, the side of my left I could reach. Snakes and geckos mostly, though I could feel a dragon curled up inside me, waiting for the right swatch of skin. I’ve talked to the grizzly old-timers, the real gunslingers of the wild west of body art, and they say you go through phases. You get stuck on something, and talk all your clients into it. What you’re trying to do is get it right, what’s in your head. You want to get it right and make it permanent, and then watch it walk away.
Like I say, though, tattooing was strictly a sideline, and, as I couldn’t afford supplies, it probably wouldn’t have been just superhygenic for me to draw on anybody, either. It was just me so far, so I guess that didn’t matter too much. But I could already see myself ten years down the road. My own shop, a girlfriend with my ink reaching north out of her bra, circling her shoulder, everybody but me having to imagine what the full image was.
Anyway, where it started: one night, to pay me back for the thing with the puppies, Dell’s on my phone, has a shiny new job.
“Seriously, morgue attendant?” I said, turning away from my living room of three people with names I hadn’t all-the-way caught.
“Different,” he said.
I told him maybe, sure, but was there two hours after midnight all the same, a cigarette pinched between my thumb and index finger.
“Leave it,” Dell said, opening the door on me and looking past in his important way. Into the parking lot.
Saddleview Funeral Chapel and Crematorium.
I rubbed my cherry out on the tall ashtray, followed him in.
~
On the way through the maze of viewing rooms to get to the back, Dell told me how he got this gravy gig. His uncle had worked here forever and a day ago, sitting up with dead soldiers mailed back from war. Or, not sitting up, but sleeping in the same room with, like a guard. It was because there had been some political vandalism or something. Anyway, the boss man now had been the boss man then, and remembered Dell’s uncle, so here Dell was. His job was to buzz the alley door open for deliveries, and not touch anything.
He was Dell, though, right?
We toured through the cold room. It was slab city, naked dead people everywhere, their usually-covered parts not nearly so interesting as I’d kind of been hoping. We put those paper mouth-masks on and felt like mad scientists drifting through the frost, deciding who to bring back, who to let rot.
“Hell yeah,” I said through my mask, and, ahead of me, Dell nodded that he knew, he knew.
I told him about who-all’d been at my place earlier, maybe lying a little, and in return, like I owed him here, he asked me for the thousandth time for my little sister’s number. Not permission, he’d always assumed he had permission to do what- and whoever he wanted. But he wanted me to middleman it.
“Off limits,” I told him, about her, trying to make my voice sound all no-joke. Because it was.
“Fruit on the limb,” Dell said, reaching up to pluck her. Except more graphically, somehow. With distinct pornographic intent.
“She’s not like us,” I said, but before we could get into our usual dance where my sister was involved, the lights dimmed. A second later, a painful buzz filled the place, coming in from all sides, like the walls were speakers.
“Delivery,” Dell said. “Hide.”
Alone in the room with the dead moments later, I looked around, breathing harder than I was meaning to. All fun and games until one of those bright white sheets slithers off, right? Until somebody sits up.
Finally I held my breath and crawled in under one of the tables, onto that clangy little shelf, some guy’s naked ass not two feet over my face, his body bloated with all kinds of vileness.
After ten minutes in which I got terminally sober, the double doors slammed back. They were the same kind restaurants have, that are made for crashing open, that don’t even have handles.
A gurney or whatever was rolling through, no legs pushing it. Just exactly what I needed, yeah. Finally it bumped into a cabinet, stopped. I breathed out but then its wheels started creaking again. It lurched its way over to right beside me, parked its haunted self inches from my face. Just far enough away for a hand to flop down in front of my face. It was pale, dead, the beds of the fingernails dark blue.
I flinched back, fell off my shelf, and Dell laughed, stepped off the belly of the new dead dude he’d been using like a knee board.
I flipped him off, pushed him away and lit a cigarette. Not like anybody in there was going to mind. Dell took one too and we leaned back against stainless steel edges, reflected on our lives.
Another lie.
What he did was haul a laser tag kit up from his locker.
It was the best war ever, at least until, trying to duck my killshot, he crashed a cart over, a dead lady spilling out, sliding to a stop at a cabinet.
I read her toe tag, looked up to her face.
On her inner thigh was a chameleon.
Everything starts somewhere, Dad.
~
Before you get worried, no, this isn’t some necro-thing about to happen. I never asked Dell what those puppies were for, but I’m pretty sure he’d nabbed them from about twelve different backyards—people in the classifieds give their addresses over so willingly—and would guess he sold them from a box in the mall parking lot. Meaning they all have good lives now. He wasn’t sacrificing them out on some lonely road or anything. He wasn’t trying to conjure up a buddy to rape dead women with.
However, if what he was looking for was somebody to trade him rides and cigarettes and ex-girlfriends’ numbers for some quality time alone in his cold room with a tat
gun, well: there I was.
When you’re looking to hire onto a parlor, to rent a booth—hell, even just to lure a mentor in—one thing you’ve always got to have, it’s an art book. A portfolio. What you can do, your greatest hits, the story of your craft.
Problem is, every two-bit dropout can pull something like that together.
But. What if, say, you’d moved to the city only a couple of months ago. And had always just done ink for friends, but were looking to go legit, now. And, what? Did I snap pics of any of those mythically-good tats?
Yeah, yes, I did.
Here.
Play with the hue a bit on your buddy’s computer, and a gecko crawling up a dead guy’s shoulder, his skin will look so alive. And there won’t even be any rash, any blood. Like you’ve got that light of a touch.
At first Dell would only let me practice on the bodies that were queued up for the oven, as that would erase evidence of our non-crime, but one night he left me alone to make a burger run—it’s cliché that morgue attendants are always eating sloppy food, but I guess it’s cliché for a reason—and I unplugged my gun, plugged it back in under the table of this woman I was pretty sure had been a yoga instructor. And recently.
Her skin was tight, springy. Most of the dead, I was having to really stretch their flesh out, then get Dell to hold it tight while I snapped the pic, so that night’s lizard wouldn’t look like it was melting off.
With her, though. I was just halfway through the iguana’s tail by the time Dell got back.
He had to let me finish, because who conks with only ten percent of a tattoo done, right?
It was a beauty, too. Just like in my head, I made the tongue curl the opposite direction the tail was, for symmetry. And where it was reaching, only her boyfriend would ever know.
Pretty as it was, though, I didn’t get any burgers—this was Dell’s punishment (like I would want to eat something his hands had been touching on)—and, to make him laugh, I inked X’s over the eyes of the guy at the front of the line for the oven. He was skinny, pale with death, still cold from the freezer, his two gunshot wounds puckered up like lips. He looked like a punk reject from 1977.
