The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  Keeping her back to him, she said, “I thought maybe standing here there’d be … something. A fragment of memory. But no.”

  “In all honesty it’s almost hard to remember it happening myself. It happened so quickly and there was so much chaos …”

  “Did anyone try to stop me? Did you?”

  Carson stopped fidgeting before answering.

  “Stop? I mean … the cops tackled you. The thing is, I think the baby was already dead. I didn’t hear crying.”

  “How did I get it?”

  “Uh …” Carson wished for a cigarette more than he had wished for anything else in the entirety of his life. “There was a huge crush of people running out of the shopping center when the police smoked them out. They think the baby was inside, and got … trampled. There was a broken stroller nearby.”

  It was, in fact, in the photograph.

  He heard Justine exhale shakily.

  “Fuck me, fuck you, and fuck this. What’s the point of us being here? I’d want me dead, too. Let’s just get this done so I can crawl back to my hole.”

  Carson silently worked his mouth open and closed, platitudes at the ready on his tongue. They didn’t want to come out, though; every fiber of his being fully agreed with her that being here was wrong. In for a penny, in for a pound, though. The texts he had been getting from his editor were becoming increasingly insistent.

  “Yeah, alright.”

  The photojournalist considered the parking lot around them, trying to avoid looking at the photo again on his iPhone and going solely by memory.

  “The pile of rubble … I’m pretty sure it was over there.”

  He pointed at a grouping of empty parking spaces, completely indistinguishable from any other in the world. Apparently not everything required a plaque.

  They made their way over, the cloud of unease silencing them. Everything was so generic and bright around them that it the entire assignment the feel of some kind of ill-planned playacting. The only piece of reality that didn’t seem a part of their make-believe was a small murder of crows nearby that were effectively edging any pigeons out of their territory.

  It seemed easier to just mumble and gesture the whole thing. In the back of his mind Carson supposed he had hoped returning here might summon up at least an emotional memory for Justine, but it was clear that whatever breakthrough he had been hoping for was doomed to die the quiet death of simply going through the motions.

  Carson pointed and shot, getting the majority of his pictures framing Justine in front of the rapidly setting sun. She crouched, stood and even sat in a few, looking pensive and disconnected in each one. The stark contrast of a traumatized woman in a new parking lot made the whole thing feel a dust-in-the-blood kind of dirty to Carson. The look in her eyes, though …

  “Alright, I think we got it. We can go.”

  She didn’t move.

  “What’s wrong?” Carson asked.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

  “Ask you what?”

  “All this time together, and you’re too timid to ask the question. I know you want to ask. It’s been all over your face since we met.”

  Carson opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his head.

  “Go ahead,” Justine said, hands on her hips. “Ask me, how can I possibly go on living after something like that? How can I make jokes and drop stupid pop culture references and eat ribs and laugh and listen to music? Isn’t that what you want to know? Isn’t that what you’ve been dying to ask me this whole time?”

  Carson didn’t know how to respond, mainly because she was dead right. It was the question he’d wanted to ask ever since he’d heard the news a month ago that the Famous Baby Eater—the subject of a photo that had won him fame he didn’t want and acclaim he didn’t deserve—was still alive.

  How do you go on living after something like that?

  Justine sighed and walked past him, muttering: “Let’s get to a hotel with a bar.”

  “Thanks for being less of a dick about this than I thought you’d be,” she said.

  They were sitting at the bar in some sports-themed joint on the ground floor of a chain hotel on the edge of Henderson, knees almost touching. Carson stared into his beer, already thinking about the new set of photos he’d just made. Wondering if it was going to do more harm than good. Of course he’d sold it to Justine as a way to show the world that she wasn’t a monster, that the Cure did work. But now he wasn’t so sure.

  Justine laid her hand over his and gave a gentle squeeze. Her other hand fiddled with her cell phone on the bar top.

  “Hey.”

  Carson met her gaze. Said nothing. What could he say? That he was about to ruin her life all over again?

  The photo of Justine eating ribs alone … ugh. She had no idea what she’d agreed to.

  “Look, I’m serious,” Justine said. “You’ve been good to me, despite everything. Which is why I feel bad about doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  Without warning she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

  To a passerby it would have looked like a couple doing a parody of a cover of a historical romance novel, except with the man in the submissive stance. Right in the thick of it, however, was a demented sincerity. Justine used her tongue to pry open his lips. What the hell was she doing?

  Justine didn’t have “death breath.” He could taste peppermint and beer; her lips were warm. But still, all he could think about was where her lips had been, and about the chunks of flesh her tongue had once licked away from her teeth …

  Before he could break the embrace he heard the sound of a fake camera shutter snapping closed.

  Oh God, Carson thought as his eye popped open and saw the cell in her hand. She’s taken a photo of her own.

  “Wait,” he said. “Please …”

  But Justine’s fingers were already working the keypad, and the photo was already on its way to a wireless cell tower, and from there… who knew? She glanced up at him.

  “Sorry, I grabbed your boss’s number when you left your cell alone at the BBQ place. He’s just one, though. I guess I could have sold this as an exclusive, but that felt a little tacky.”

  Carson pulled back from the table and just stared. His eyes felt feverish as they flitted from Justine’s face to the phone, to the staring bar patrons surrounding them.

  “You want to know what it was like, to have your worst moment broadcast to the world?” Justine asked. “Buddy, you’re about to find out.”

  She smiled, and reached back to hold his shaking hand. “But at least we have each other, right?”

  WILD ACRE

  NATHAN BALLINGRUD

  Three men are lying in what will someday be a house. For now it’s just a skeleton of beams and supports, standing amid the foundations and frames of other burgeoning houses in a large, bulldozed clearing. The earth around them is a churned, orange clay. Forest abuts the Wild Acre development site, crawling up the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, hickory and maple hoarding darkness as the sky above them shades into deepening blue. The hope is that soon there will be finished buildings here, and then more skeletons and more houses, with roads to navigate them. But now there are only felled trees, and mud, and these naked frames. And three men, lying on a cold wooden floor, staring up through the roof beams as the sky organizes a nightfall. They have a cooler packed with beer and a baseball bat.

  Several yards away, mounted in the back of Jeremy’s truck, is a hunting rifle.

  Jeremy watches stars burn into life: first two, then a dozen. He came here hoping for violence, but the evening has softened him. Lying on his back, balancing a beer on the great swell of his belly, he hopes there will be no occasion for it. Wild Acre is abandoned for now, and might be for a long time to come, making it an easy target. Three nights over the past week, someone has come onto the work site and committed small but infuriating acts of vandalism: stealing and damaging tools and equipment, spray painting vulgar images on
the project manager’s trailer, even taking a dump on the floor of one of the unfinished houses. The project manager complained to the police, but with production stalled and bank accounts running dry, angry subcontractors and prospective homeowners consumed most of his attention. The way Jeremy saw things, it was up to the trade guys to protect the site. He figured the vandals for environmental activists, pissed that their mountain had been shaved for this project; he worried that they’d soon start burning down his frames. Insurance would cover the developer, but he and his company would go bankrupt. So he’s come here with Dennis and Renaldo – his best friend and his most able brawler, respectively – hoping to catch them in the act and beat them into the dirt.

  “They’re not coming tonight,” says Renaldo.

  “No shit,” says Dennis. “You think it’s ‘cause you talk too loud?” Dennis has been with Jeremy ten years now. For a while, Jeremy thought about making him partner, but the man just couldn’t keep his shit together, and Jeremy privately nixed the idea. Dennis is forty-eight years old, ten years older than Jeremy. His whole life is invested in this work: he’s a carpenter and nothing else. He has three young children, and talks about having more. This work stoppage threatens to impoverish him. “Bunch of goddamn Green Party eco-fucking-terrorist motherfuckers,” Dennis says.

  Jeremy watches him. Dennis is moving his jaw around, working himself into a rage. That would be useful if he thought anybody was going to show tonight; but he thinks they’ve screwed it all up. They got here too early, before the sun was down, and they made too much noise. No one will come now.

  “Dude. Grab yourself a beer and mellow out.”

  “These kids are fucking with my life, man! You tell me to mellow out?”

  “Dennis, man, you’re not the only one.” A breeze comes down the mountain and washes over them. Jeremy feels it move through his hair, deepening his sense of easy contentment. He remembers feeling that rage just this afternoon, talking to that asshole from the bank, and he knows he’ll feel it again. He knows he’ll have to. But right now it’s as distant and alien as the full moon, catching fire unknown miles above them. “But they’re not here. ‘Naldo’s right, we blew it. We’ll come back tomorrow night.” He looks into the forest crowding against the development site, and wonders why they didn’t think to hide themselves there. “And we’ll do it right. So for tonight? Just chill.”

  Renaldo leans over and claps Dennis on the back. “Mañana, amigo. Mañana!”

  Jeremy knows that Renaldo’s optimism is one of the reasons Dennis resents him, but the young Mexican wouldn’t be able to function in this all-white crew without it. He gets a lot of crap from these guys and just takes it. When work is this hard to come by, pride is a luxury. Nevertheless Jeremy is dismayed at Renaldo’s easy manner in the face of it all. A man can’t endure that kind of diminishment, he thinks, and not release anger somewhere.

  Dennis casts Jeremy a defeated look. The sky retains a faint glow from twilight, but darkness has settled over the ground. The men are black shapes. “It’s not the same for you, man. Your wife works, you know? You got another income. My wife don’t do shit.”

  “That’s not just her fault, though, Dennis. What would you do if Rebecca told you she was getting a job tomorrow?”

  “I’d say it’s about goddamned time!”

  Jeremy laughs. “Bullshit. You’d just knock her up again. If that woman went out into the world you’d lose your mind, and you know it.”

  Dennis shakes his head, but a sort of smile breaks through.

  The conversation has undermined whatever small good the beer has done for him tonight: all the old fears are stirring. He hasn’t been able to pay these men for three weeks now, and even an old friend like Dennis will have to move on eventually. The business hasn’t paid a bill in months, and Tara’s teacher’s salary certainly isn’t enough to support them by itself. He realizes that their objective tonight is mostly just an excuse to vent some anger; cracking some misguided kids’ heads isn’t going to get the bank to stop calling him, and it isn’t going to get the bulldozers moving again. It isn’t going to let him call his crew and tell them they can come back to work, either.

  But he won’t let it get to him tonight. Not this beautiful, moonlit night on the mountain, with bare wood lifting skyward all around them. “Fuck it,” he says, and claps his hands twice, a reclining sultan. “Naldo! Más cervesas!”

  Renaldo, who has just settled onto his back, slowly folds himself into a sitting position. He climbs to his feet and heads to the cooler without complaint. He’s accustomed to being the gofer.

  “Little Mexican bastard,” Dennis says. “I bet he’s got fifty cousins packed into a trailer he’s trying to support.”

  “Hablo fucking ingles, motherfucker,” Renaldo says.

  “What? Speak English! I can’t understand you.”

  Jeremy laughs. They drink more beer, and the warmth of it washes through their bodies until they are illuminated, three little candles in a clearing, surrounded by the dark woods.

  Jeremy says, “I gotta take a piss, dude.” The urge has been building in him for some time, but he’s been lying back on the floor, his body filled with a warm, beery lethargy, and he’s been reluctant to move. Now it manifests as a sudden, urgent pain, sufficient to propel him to his feet and across the red clay road. The wind has risen and the forest is a wall of dark sound, the trees no longer distinct from each other but instead a writhing movement, a grasping energy which prickles his skin and hurries his step. The moon, which only a short while ago seemed a kindly lantern in the dark, smolders in the sky. Behind him, Dennis and Renaldo continue some wandering conversation, and he holds onto the sound of their voices to ward off a sudden, inexplicable rising fear. He casts a glance back toward the house. The ground inclines toward it, and at this angle he can’t see either of them. Just the cross-gables shouldering into the sky.

  He steps into the tree line, going back a few feet for modesty’s sake. Situating himself behind a tree, he opens his fly and lets loose. The knot of pain in his gut starts to unravel.

  Walking around has lit up the alcohol in his blood, and he’s starting to feel angry again. If I don’t get to hit somebody soon, he thinks, I’m going to snap. I’m going to unload on somebody that doesn’t deserve it. If Dennis opens his whining mouth one more time it might be him.

  Jeremy feels a twinge of remorse at the thought; Dennis is one of those guys who has to talk about his fears, or they’ll eat him alive. He has to give a running commentary on every grim possibility, as if by voicing a fear he’d chase it into hiding. Jeremy relates more to Renaldo, who has yet to utter one frustrated thought about how long it’s been since he’s been paid, or what their future prospects might be. He doesn’t really know Renaldo, knows his personal situation even less, and something about that strikes him as proper. The idea of a man keening in pain has always embarrassed him.

  When Jeremy has weak moments, he saves them for private expression. Even Tara, who has been a rock of optimism throughout all of this, isn’t privy to them. She’s a smart, intuitive woman, though, and Jeremy recognizes his fortune in her. She assures him that he is both capable and industrious, and that he can find work other than hammering nails into wood, should it come down to it. She’s always held the long view. He feels a sudden swell of love for her, as he stands there pissing in the woods: a desperate, childlike need. He blinks rapidly, clearing his eyes.

  He’s staring absently into the forest as he thinks this all through, and so it takes him a few moments to focus his gaze and realize that someone is staring back at him.

  It’s a young man—a kid, really—several feet deeper into the forest, obscured by low growth and hanging branches and darkness. He’s skinny and naked. Smiling at him. Just grinning like a jack-o-lantern.

  “Oh, shit!”

  Jeremy lurches from the tree, yanking frantically at his zipper, which has caught on the denim of his pants. He staggers forward a step, his emotions a snarl o
f rage, excitement, and humiliation. “What the fuck!” he shouts. The kid bounds to his right and disappears, soundlessly.

  “Dennis? Dennis! They’re here!”

  He turns but he can’t see up the hill. The angle is bad. All he can see through the trees is the pale wooden frame standing out against the sky like bones, and he’s taking little hopping steps as he wrestles with his zipper. He trips over a root and crashes painfully to the ground.

  He hears Dennis’s raised voice.

  He climbs awkwardly to his feet. The zipper finally comes free and Jeremy yanks it up, running clumsily through the branches while fastening his fly. As he ascends the small incline and crosses the muddy road he can discern shapes wrestling between the wooden support struts; he hears them fighting, hears the brute explosions of breath and the heavy impact of colliding meat. It sounds like the kid is putting up a pretty good fight; Jeremy wants to get in on the action before it’s all over. He’s overcome by instinct and violent impulse.

  He’s exalted by it.

  A voice breaks out of the tumult and it’s so warped by anguish that it takes him a moment to recognize it as Dennis’s scream.

  Jeremy jerks to a stop. He burns crucial seconds trying to understand what he’s heard.

  And then he hears something else: a heavy tearing, like ripping canvas, followed by a liquid sound of dropped weight, of moist, heavy objects sliding to the ground. He catches a glimpse of motion, something huge and fast in the house and then an inverted leg standing out suddenly like a dark rip in the bright flank of stars, and then nothing. A high, keening wail—ephemeral, barely audible—rises from the unfinished house like a wisp of smoke.

  Finally he reaches the top of the hill and looks inside.

  Dennis is on his back, his body frosted by moonlight. He’s lifting his head, staring down at himself. Organs are strewn to one side of his body like beached, black jellyfish, dark blood pumping slowly from the gape in his belly and spreading around him in a gory nimbus. His head drops back and he lifts it again. Renaldo is on his back too, arms flailing, trying to hold off the thing bestride him: huge, black-furred, dog-begotten, its man-like fingers wrapped around Renaldo’s face and pushing his head into the floor so hard that the wood cracks beneath it. It lifts its shaggy head, bloody ropes of drool swinging from its snout and arcing into the moonsilvered night. It peels its lips from its teeth. Renaldo’s screams are muffled beneath its hand.