The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  Her face was really what drove it home, what really hurt me. Her sweet face.

  My hand fixed itself to the casket edge in painful whiteness, but I dared not remove it. Something caught in my throat and I forced it back down.

  A lone fly, fat and glistening, crawled from inside the bag and flew lazily towards Hadley. He slowly rose to his feet and braced himself, as if against a body blow. He watched it rise and flit a clumsy path through the air. Then he broke the moment by stepping back, his hands flailing and hitting it—I heard the slap of his hand—and letting a nauseous sound escape his lips.

  When I stood up, my temples throbbed and my legs weakened. I held onto a nearby casket, my throat filled with something rancid.

  “Close it,” he said like a man with his mouth full. “Close it.”

  My arms went rubbery. After bracing myself, I lifted one leg and kicked the lid. It rang out like an artillery shot. Pressure pounded into my ears like during a rapid descent.

  Hadley put his hands on his haunches and lowered his head, taking deep breaths through his mouth. “Jesus,” he croaked.

  I saw movement. Pembry stood next to the line of coffins, her face pulled up in sour disgust. “What—is—that—smell?”

  “It’s okay.” I found I could work one arm and tried what I hoped looked like an off-handed gesture. “Found the problem. Had to open it up though. Go sit down.”

  Pembry brought her hands up around herself and went back to her seat.

  I found that with a few more deep breaths, the smell dissipated enough to act. “We have to secure it,” I told Hadley.

  He looked up from the floor and I saw his eyes as narrow slits. His hands were in fists and his broad torso stood fierce and straight. At the corner of his eyes, wetness glinted. He said nothing.

  It became cargo again as I fastened the latches. We strained to fit it back into place. In a matter of minutes, the other caskets were stowed, the exterior straps were in place, the cargo netting draped and secure.

  Hadley waited for me to finish up, then walked forwards with me. “I’m going to tell the AC you solved the problem,” he said, “and to get us back to speed.”

  I nodded.

  “One more thing,” he said. “If you see that fly, kill it.”

  “Didn’t you…”

  “No.”

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, “Yes, sir.”

  Pembry sat in her seat, nose wriggled up, feigning sleep. Hernandez sat upright, eyelids half open. He gestured for me to come closer, bend down.

  “Did you let them out to play?” he asked.

  I stood over him and said nothing. In my heart, I felt that same pang I did as a child, when summer was over.

  When we landed in Dover, a funeral detail in full dress offloaded every coffin, affording full funeral rights to each person. I’m told as more bodies flew in, the formality was scrapped and only a solitary Air Force chaplain met the planes. By week’s end I was back in Panama with a stomach full of turkey and cheap rum. Then it was off to the Marshall Islands, delivering supplies to the guided missile base there. In the Military Air Command, there is no shortage of cargo.

  E. Michael Lewis says: “Of the nine hundred people who died in the

  Jonestown Massacre, nearly a third of them were under the age of eighteen.

  This story is dedicated to the families who lost loved ones at Jonestown, and

  to the servicemen and -women who brought them home.”

  TENDER AS TEETH

  STEPHANIE CRAWFORD AND

  DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI

  “Is it true that the cure made all of you vegetarians?” Carson asked.

  Justine was staring at the road ahead, but could see him toying with his digital recorder in her peripheral vision. He was asking a flurry of questions, but at the same time, avoiding The Big Question. She wished he’d just come out with it already.

  “Why are you asking me?” she replied. “I’m not the mouthpiece for every single survivor.”

  Carson stammered a little before Justine glanced over and gave him a wide grin.

  “Oh yes, I referred to former zombies as survivors. Make sure to include that. Your readers will love it.”

  As they drove across the desert the sun was pulling the sky from black to a gritty blue-grey. The rented compact car held a thirty-three-year-old man named Carson with enough expensive camera equipment to crowd up the backseat, and Justine, a woman two years younger, who kept her own small shoulder bag between her feet.

  The rest of her baggage was invisible.

  Some said as far as apocalyptic plagues went, it could have been a lot worse.

  The dead didn’t crawl out of their graves. Society didn’t crumble entirely. The infection didn’t spread as easily as it did in the movies—you had to either really try to get infected, or be genetically predisposed to it.

  Justine happened to be one of the latter.

  After work one night, Justine was nursing a Pabst at her local generic, suburban sports bar while half-listening to the news about a virus that would probably quiet down like H1N1 and texting her late friend Gina. She was just raising the bottle’s mouth to her lips when a thick, dead weight fell against her and knocked her out of her bar stool and onto the sticky, peanut shell covered floor. Too fucking enraged to wait for a good Samaritan to jump up and give a Hey, Pal, Justine started blindly kicking out her heels and thrusting out fists at the drunk bastard. That’s how it played out until the drunk started gnawing at her fists until his incisors connected with the actual bone of her fingers while his mouth worked to slurp up and swallow the shredded meat of her knuckles. After that, Justine remembered little until the cure hit her bloodstream.

  That had been six months after the attack in the bar. And in the meantime …

  Carson tried to look at Justine without full-on staring at her. Like much of the time he’d spent with her so far, he was fairly certain he was failing miserably. The miracle vaccine seemed to have left Justine with little more damage than a scarred face, a lean-muscled body that bordered on emaciation, and an entire planet filled with people who actively wanted her dead. That was called “being one of the lucky ones.”

  Keep her talking, he reminded himself. Carson asked, “I understand your mom paid for the cure?”

  Justine kicked the glove compartment while crossing her legs. “Sadly, yes. I guess she meant well.”

  “Aren’t you glad to be alive?”

  “If you call this living.”

  “Better than being dead.”

  She turned to face him, squinting and twisting her lips into a pout. “Is it?”

  Asking questions was the problem, Carson decided. He wasn’t a real journalist. He’d only brought the digital recorder to please his editor, who couldn’t afford to send both a photographer and a reporter.

  Just keep her talking as much as possible, the editor had said. We’ll make sense of it later.

  But most important, his editor added, we want her to talk about what it’s like.

  What what is like? Carson had asked.

  His editor replied: What it’s like to go on living.

  A year ago today he’d been out in Las Vegas for one of the most inane reasons of all: a photo shoot for a celebrity cookbook. The celebrity in question was a borderline morbidly obese actor known for both his comedic roles as well as his darker turns in mob flicks. Right before he’d left on that trip the first outbreaks had been reported, but the virus seemed to be contained to certain parts of the country, and Carson thought he’d come to regret it if he turned down the assignment over the latest health scare. Especially if that would leave him stuck in his Brooklyn apartment for months on end while this thing ran its course. They were saying it could be as bad as the 1918 flu pandemic.

  Oh, if he had only known.

  The outbreak had happened mid-shoot. A pack of zombies had burst in just as the food stylist had finished with the chicken scarpariello. They weren’t interested in the dish.
They wanted the celebrity chef instead. Carson kept snapping photos before he quite realized what was happening. He escaped across Vegas, continuing to take photos as the city tore itself apart.

  And then he saw Justine, though he didn’t know her name then.

  Back then, she was just …

  Carson heard his editor’s impatient reminder in his head:

  Keep her talking.

  Yeah.

  Not talking was the reason he’d become a photographer. He preferred to keep the lens between himself and the rest of the world, speaking to subjects only when he absolutely had to.

  He was struggling to formulate a new inane question when she spoke up.

  “Do you remember the exact place?”

  Carson nodded.

  “So where was it?” Justine asked.

  That surprised him. He assumed she would have just … known. Maybe not when she was in that state, because the former zombies—the survivors—were supposed to have blanked memories. The photo, though … surely she had to have seen the photo at some point.

  Or did she?

  “Outside of Vegas. Almost near Henderson.”

  “Huh,” Justine said. “Makes sense.”

  “Does it?”

  “That’s not far from where I used to live. So come on. Where did you … um, encounter me?”

  Carson pulled onto the 5, which would take them out of the Valley and out through the desert. “I’m hoping I’ll be able to find it again once we’re out there,” he said.

  “Don’t count on it, buddy boy,” she said. “My mom tells me they’ve razed a lot of the old neighborhood. There’s even been talk of abandoning Vegas altogether. Clear everyone out, then drop an H-bomb directly on it. Wipe the slate clean.”

  Carson, still fumbling, heard the question tumble out of his mouth before he could stop himself.

  “Have you, um, seen the photo?”

  Justine had woken up in the hospital, still spoiling for a fight. After about a minute her eyes registered that she was in a hospital bed, and she felt her mom squeezing her hand through layers of aching pain and a wooziness that could only be coming from the IV attached to her arm—so she’d assumed. So the bastard actually put her in the hospital?

  Justine’s first lucid words were spent reassuring her mom, who herself looked like she’d been put through the wringer.

  “Hey ma, it’s alright … you should see the other guy.”

  That’s what she attempted to say, at any rate. It came out sounding more like “ACK-em, aight … shouldas … other guy.” Her voice sounded cracked and enfeebled … almost as if her actual esophagus was bruised and coated in grime.

  Her mother teared up and went in for the most delicate hug Justine could remember ever having experienced.

  “Thank God … He finally showed up. Thank God you’re back, and thank Him that you don’t remember.”

  It was only then that Justine noticed that the doctors and nurses surrounding her had what could only be taken as unprofessional looks of pure, barely disguised looks of disgust on their faces. All this for a fucking bar fight she didn’t even start?

  Before Justine could ask what exactly was going on, her mom cupped her palm against her daughter’s cheek: Justine couldn’t help realizing how hollowed out it felt against her mom’s warm hand.

  “Sweetie … I have a lot I need to tell you. It’s not when you think it is, and you’re not exactly who you think you are anymore. The world got infected and wormed you worse than anyone. You’re going to need to prepare yourself. Just know I love you, always.”

  And then her mom told her what the world had been up to.

  Justine stared at the passing power lines with an interest they didn’t exactly warrant. “Is this professional curiosity?”

  “No,” Carson said. “I’d really like to know.”

  Justine glanced over at Carson, who gave her a tight-lipped smile. She had done her research on him, and she was almost personally insulted by what she found. A small part of her was hoping she’d get a gonzo journalist-type that would end the interview with him trying to hunt her in a “most dangerous game” scenario. Carson was, at best, a mid-level photog—his writing credits adding up to captions under his glossy photos of celebrities she had never heard of. There were a few dashes of pretension, but he was clearly paying the bills.

  Except for those unexpected, dramatic moments every photographer lives for. He had a few absorbing shots.

  The main one starring her ownself.

  “My mom kept it from me for as long as possible. She acted a bit as if seeing it would trigger me, somehow. But … eh.”

  Justine started absently gnawing on a fingernail with more vigor that she realized.

  “I’ll see little thumbnails on Google and squint my eyes to blur it out. I’ve been told about it enough that my taste to see the actual money shot has long been sated.”

  Justine glanced over at Carson to see how that landed. She was sleep deprived and barely knew the guy, but he somehow looked … puzzled.

  Was she serious? How could she have not looked?

  Carson knew he’d created that photo by pure accident. Even the framing and lighting and composition were a happy accident—a trifecta of the perfect conditions, snapped at exactly the right moment. He admitted it. He’d lucked into it. He couldn’t even claim to have created that photo. He’d merely been the one holding the camera, his index finger twitching. That image wanted to exist; he was simply the conduit.

  The photo wasn’t his fault, just like her … sickness … wasn’t her fault. They were like two car accident victims, thrown together by chance, and left to deal with the wreckage.

  He got all that.

  Still … how could she not want to see? How could you ever hope to recover if you didn’t confront it head-on?

  “Pull over,” she said suddenly.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Unless you want to clean chunks of puke out of this rental, pull over now. Please.”

  Carson was temporarily desert-blind. He couldn’t tell where the edge of the broken road ended and the dead, dry earth began. Blinking, he slowly edged to the right as Justine’s hands fumbled at the door handle. He saw—felt—her entire body jolt. He applied the brake, kicking up a huge plume of dust. Justine flew out of the passenger seat even before the car had come to a complete halt. She disappeared into the dust. Within seconds, Carson could hear her heaving.

  He knew this was what the Cure did to you. It took away the zombie, but left you a very, very sick person.

  Should he get out? Did she maybe want a little water, or her privacy? He didn’t know. For a moment, Carson sat behind the wheel, watching the dust settle back down. There were a lot of dust storms out here, he’d read. The Southwest hadn’t seen them this bad since the 30s Dust Bowl days. Some people thought it was nature’s way of trying to wipe the slate clean, one sharp grain of sand at a time.

  All was quiet; she’d stopped heaving.

  “Justine?” he called out. “You okay?”

  He opened the door just as the truck pulled up behind them. Damnit. Probably a good Samaritan, thinking they needed help.

  “Justine?”

  Car doors slammed behind Carson. He turned off the ignition, pulled the keys from the steering column, pushed open the door with his foot, stepped out into the hot, dry air. There were three people standing there. Carson was struck at first by how familiar they looked, but couldn’t immediately place them. Not until one of them said,

  “Where’s the babykiller?”

  Fuck me, he thought. It was the protesters.

  They’d followed them out into the desert.

  When Carson arrived at Justine’s Burbank apartment just a few hours earlier, he was stunned to see them there, carrying placards and pacing up and down the front walkway. They must have been at it all night, and towards the end of some kind of “shift,” because they look tired, haggard and vacant eyed. Ironically enough, they kind of looked like you-
know-whats.

  Carson was equally stunned by the things coming out of their mouths, the sheer hate painted on their signs.

  AN ABOMINATION LIVES HERE.

  THAT BABY HAD A FUTURE.

  KILL YOURSELF JUSTINE.

  Delusional people who had to seize on something, he supposed. There was a whole “Disbelief in the Cure” movement going on now, with a groundswell of people who brought out these pseudo-scientists claiming that the Cure was only temporary, that at any moment, thousands of people could revert to flesh-eating monsters again. There was not a lick of scientific evidence to back this up, mind you. But when has that stopped zealots before?

  Carson had parked the car a block away, in the rubble of a lot in front of an old 50s-style motel that had promptly gone out of business a year ago during the chaos. He wiped the sweat from his brow—wasn’t California supposed to be cooler this time of year? At first he grabbed his small digital camera and locked everything else in the trunk, figuring that if he tried to run that gauntlet with his full gear there was a strong chance he’d be molested. Carson was prepared for anything, but wasn’t in the mood to lose ten grand worth of gear that he knew the paper wouldn’t replace.

  But then again, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro … wasn’t that what Hunter S. Thompson said? Carson donned his vest (he hated it, but people associated it with being a pro, so …) and walked right up to the nutcases, smiling. That’s right, he thought. Just a happy photojournalist on assignment, here to take your picture.

  That’s the thing: you don’t ask. You keep your camera low and just start shooting. Ask, and there’s a strong chance they’ll think, Hey, wait a minute, maybe I shouldn’t agree to this. But if you act like God Himself sent you down here to record the moments for posterity, most people will step out of your way and let you do His Holy Work. Carson snapped away from waist level. Sometimes you want that feeling of looking up from a child’s POV, right up into the faces of these lunatics, the sun bouncing from their hand-painted signs. Carson was feeling good about the assignment when something hard slammed into the center of his back and he tumbled forward into someone’s fist.