The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  “Shoot it,” Dennis says. His voice is calm, like he’s suggesting coffee. “Shoot it, Jeremy.”

  The house swings out of sight and the road scrolls by, lurching and violently tilting, and Jeremy realizes with some dismay that he is running. His truck, a small white pickup, is less than fifty feet away. Parked just beyond it is Renaldo’s little import, its windows rolled down, rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirror.

  Jeremy runs fill-tilt into the side of his truck, rebounding off it and almost falling to the ground. He opens the door and is inside with what feels like unnatural speed. He slides across to the driver’s side and digs into his pocket for the keys, fingers grappling furiously through change and crumpled receipts until he finds them.

  He can feel the rifle mounted on the rack behind his head, radiating a monstrous energy. It’s loaded; it’s always loaded.

  He looks through the passenger window and sees something stand upright inside the frames, looking back at him. He sees Renaldo spasming beneath it. He sees the dark forested mountains looming behind this stillborn community with a hostile intelligence. He guns the engine and slams down the accelerator, turning the wheel hard to the left. The tires spray mud in huge arcs until they find traction, and he speeds down the hill toward the highway. The truck bounces hard on the rough path and briefly goes airborne. The engine screams, the sound of it filling his head.

  “What the hell are you looking at?”

  “What?” Jeremy blinked, and looked at his wife.

  Breakfast time at the Blue Plate was always busy, but today the noise and the crowd were unprecedented. People crowded on the bench by the door, waiting for a chance to sit down. Short order cooks and servers hollered at each other over the din of loud customers, boiling fryers, and crackling griddles. He knew that Tara hated it here, but on bad days—and he’s had plenty of bad days in the six months since the attack—he needed to be in places like this. Even now, wedged into a booth too narrow for him, with the table’s edge pressing uncomfortably into his gut, he did not want to leave.

  His attention was drawn by the new busboy. He was young and gangly, lanky hair swinging over his lowered face. He scurried from empty table to empty table, loading dirty plates and coffee mugs into his gray bus tub. He moved with a strange grace through the crowd, like someone well practiced at avoidance. Jeremy was bothered that he couldn’t get a clear view of his face.

  “Why do you think he wears his hair like that?” he said. “He looks like a drug addict or something. I’m surprised they let him.”

  Tara rolled her eyes, not even bothering to look. “The busboy? Are you serious?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “What? Of course. Come on.” He forced his attention back where it belonged. “You’re talking about that guy who teaches the smart kids. What’s his name. Tim.”

  Tara let her stare linger a moment before pressing on. “Yeah, I mean, what an asshole, right? He knows I’m married!”

  “Well, that’s the attraction.”

  “The fact that I’m married to you is why he wants me? Oh my God, and I thought he had an ego!”

  “No, I mean, you’re hot, he’d be into you anyway. But the fact that you belong to somebody just adds another incentive. It’s a challenge.”

  “Wait.”

  “Some guys just like to take what isn’t theirs.”

  “Wait. I belong to you now?”

  He smiled. “Well … yeah, bitch.”

  She laughed. “You are so lucky we’re in a public place right now.”

  “You’re not scary.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty scary.”

  “Then how come you can’t scare off little Timmy?”

  She gave him an exasperated look. “Do you think I’m not trying? He just doesn’t care. I think he thinks I’m flirting with him or something. I want him to see you at the Christmas party. Get all alpha male on him. Squeeze his hand really hard when you shake it or something.”

  A waitress arrived at their table and unloaded their breakfast: fruit salad and a scrambled egg for Tara, a mound of buttery pancakes for Jeremy. Tara cast a critical eye over his plate and said, “We gotta work on that diet of yours, big man. There’s a new year coming up. Resolution time.”

  “Like hell,” he said, tucking in. “This is my fuel. I need it if I’m going to defeat Tim in bloody combat.”

  The sentence hung awkwardly between them. Jeremy found himself staring at her, the stupid smile on his face frozen into something miserable and strange. His scalp prickled and he felt his face go red.

  “Well, that was dumb,” he said.

  She put her hand over his. “Honey.”

  He pulled away. “Whatever.” He forked some of the pancakes into his mouth, staring down at his plate.

  He breathed in deeply, taking in the close, burnt-oil odor of the place, trying to displace the smell of blood and fear which welled up inside him as though he was on the mountain again, half a year ago, watching his friends die in the rearview mirror. He looked around again to see if he could get a look at that creepy busboy’s face, but he couldn’t spot him in the crowd.

  The coroner had decided that a wolf had killed Dennis and Renaldo. It was a big story in the local news for a week or so; there weren’t supposed to be any wolves in this part of North Carolina. Nevertheless, the bite marks and the tracks in the mud were clear. Hunting parties had ranged into the woods; they’d bagged a few coyotes, but no wolves. The developer of Wild Acre filed for bankruptcy: buyers who had signed conditional agreements refused to close on the houses, and the banks gave up on the project, locking their coffers for good. Wild Acre became a ghost town of empty house frames and mud. Jeremy’s outfit went under too. He broke the news to his employees and began the dreary process of appeasing his creditors. Tara still pulled down her teacher’s salary, but it was barely enough to keep pace, let alone catch them up. They weren’t sure how much longer they could afford their own house.

  Within a month of the attack, Jeremy discovered that he was unemployable. Demand for his services had dried up. The framing companies were streamlining their payrolls, and nobody wanted to add an expensive ex-owner to their rosters.

  He never told his wife what really happened that night. Publicly, he corroborated the coroner’s theory, and he tried as best he could to convince himself of it, too. But the thing that had straddled his friend and then stared him down had not been a wolf.

  He could not call it by its name.

  In the middle of all that were the funerals.

  Renaldo’s had been a small, cheap affair. He’d felt like an imposter there, too close to the tumultuous emotion on display. Renaldo’s mother filled the room with her cries. Jeremy felt alarmed and even a little appalled at her lack of self-consciousness, which was so at odds with her late son’s unflappable nature. Everyone spoke in Spanish, and he was sure they were all talking about him. On some level he knew this was ridiculous, but he couldn’t shake it.

  A young man approached him, late teens or early twenties, dressed in an ill-fitting, rented suit, his hands hanging stiffly at his sides.

  Jeremy nodded at him. “Hola,” he said. He felt awkward and stupid.

  “Hello,” the man said. “You were his boss?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m, um … I’m sorry. He was a great worker. You know, one of my best. The guys really liked him. If you knew my guys, you’d know that meant something.” He realized he was beginning to ramble, and made himself stop talking.

  “Thank you.”

  “Were you brothers?”

  “Brothers-in-law. Married to my sister?”

  “Oh, of course.” Jeremy didn’t know Renaldo had been married. He looked across the gathered crowd, thinking for one absurd moment that he might know her by sight.

  “Listen,” the man said, “I know you’re having some hard times. The business and everything.”

  Well, here it comes, Jeremy thought. He
tried to cut him off at the pass. “I still owed some money to Renaldo. I haven’t forgotten. I’ll get it to you as soon as I can. I promise.”

  “To Carmen.”

  “Of course. To Carmen.”

  “That’s good.” He nodded, looking at the ground. Jeremy could sense there was more coming, and he wanted to get away before it arrived. He opened his mouth to express a final platitude before taking his leave, but the young man spoke first. “Why didn’t you shoot it?”

  He felt something grow cold inside him. “What?”

  “I know why you were there. Renaldo told me what was happening. The vandals? He said you had a rifle.”

  Jeremy bristled. “Listen, I don’t know what Renaldo thought, but we weren’t going up there to shoot anybody. We were going to scare them. That’s all. The gun’s in my truck because I’m a hunter. I don’t use it to threaten kids.”

  “But it wasn’t kids on the mountain that night, was it?”

  They stared at each other for a moment. Jeremy’s face was flushed, and he could hear the laboring of his own breath. By contrast the young man seemed entirely at ease; either he didn’t really care about why Jeremy didn’t shoot that night or he already knew that the answer wouldn’t satisfy him.

  “No, I guess it wasn’t.”

  “It was a wolf, right?”

  Jeremy was silent.

  “A wolf?”

  He had to moisten his mouth. “Yeah.”

  “So why didn’t you shoot it?”

  “ … It happened really fast,” he said. “I was out in the woods. I was too late.”

  Renaldo’s brother-in-law gave no reaction, holding his gaze for a few more moments and then nodding slightly. He took a deep breath, turned to look behind him at the others gathered for the funeral, some of whom were staring in their direction. Then he turned back to Jeremy and said, “Thank you for coming. But maybe now, you know, you should go. It’s hard for some people to see you.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Of course.” Jeremy backed up a step, and said, “I’m really sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  And then he left, grateful to get away, but nearly overwhelmed by shame. He’d removed the rifle from his truck the day after the attack, stowing it in the attic. Its presence was an indictment. Despite what he’d told Renaldo’s brother-in-law, he didn’t know why he hadn’t taken the gun, climbed back out of the truck, and blown the wolf to hell. Because that’s all it had been. A wolf. A stupid animal. How many animals had he killed with that very rifle?

  Dennis’s funeral had been different. There, he was treated like family, if a somewhat distant and misunderstood relation. Rebecca, obese and unemployed, looked doomed as she stood graveside with her three children, completely unanchored from the only person in the world who had cared about her fate, or the fates of those stunned boys at her side. He wanted to apologize to her but he didn’t know precisely how, so instead he hugged her after the services and shook the boys’ hands and said, “If there’s anything I can do.”

  She wrapped him in a hug. “Jeremy,” she said.

  The boy is skinny and naked. Smiling at him, his teeth shining like cut crystal. Jeremy’s pants are unfastened and loose around his hips. He’s afraid that if he runs they’ll fall and trip him up. The kid can’t even be out of high school yet: Jeremy knows he can break him in half if he can just get his hands on him in time. But it’s already too late; terror pins him there, and he can only watch. The kid’s body begins to shake, and what he thought was a smile is only a rictus of pain – his mouth splits along his cheeks and something loud breaks inside him, cracking like a tree branch. The boy’s bowels spray blood and his body convulses like he’s in the grip of a seizure.

  “Jeremy!”

  He opened his eyes. He was in their bedroom, with Tara standing over him. The light was on. The bed felt warm and damp.

  “Get out of bed. You had a nightmare.”

  “Why is the bed all wet?”

  She pulled him by his shoulder. She had a strange expression: distracted, pinched. “Come on,” she said. “You had an accident.”

  “What?” He sat up, smelling urine. “What?”

  “Get out of bed, please. I have to change the sheets.”

  He did as she asked. His legs were sticky, his boxers soaked.

  Tara began yanking the sheets off the bed as quickly as she could. She tugged the mattress pad off too, and cursed quietly when she saw that the stain had already bled down to the mattress itself.

  “Let me help,” he said.

  “You should get in the shower. I’ll take care of this.”

  “ … I’m sorry.”

  She turned on him. For a moment he saw the anger and the impatience there, and he was conscious of how long she had been putting up with his stoic routine, of the extent to which she had fastened down her own frustration for the sake of his wounded ego. It threatened to finally spill over, but she pulled it back, she sucked it in for him one more time. Her expression softened. She touched his cheek. “It’s okay, baby.” She pushed the hair from his forehead, turning the gesture into a caress. “Go ahead and get in the shower, okay?”

  “Okay.” He headed for the bathroom.

  He stripped and got under the hot water. Six months of being without work had caused him to get even heavier, a fact he was acutely conscious of as he lowered himself to the floor and wrapped his arms around his knees. He did not want Tara to see him. He wanted to barricade the door, to wrap barbed wire around the whole room. But fifteen minutes later she joined him there, putting her arms around him and pulling him close, resting her head against his.

  Two months after the funeral, Dennis’s wife had called and asked him to come over. He arrived at her house—a single-story, three-bedroom bungalow—later that afternoon, and was dismayed to see boxes in the living room and the kitchen. The kids, ranging in age from five to thirteen, moved ineffectively among them, piling things in with no regard to maximizing their space or gauging how heavy they might become. Rebecca was a dervish of industry, sliding through the mazes of boxes and furniture with a surprising grace, barking orders at her kids and even at her herself. When she saw him through the screen door, standing on her front porch, she stopped, and in doing so seemed to lose all of her will to move. The boys stopped too, and followed her gaze out to him.

  “Becca, what’s going on?”

  “What’s it look like? I’m packing boxes.” She turned her back to him and moved through an arch into the kitchen. “Come on in, then,” she called.

  Sitting across from her at the table, glasses of orange soda between them, he was further struck by the disorganized quality of the move. The number of boxes seemed sadly inadequate to the task, and it seemed like things were being packed piecemeal: some dishes were wrapped in newspaper and stowed, while others were still stacked in cupboards or piled, dirty, in the sink; drawers hung open, partially disemboweled.

  Before Jeremy could open his mouth, Rebecca said, “They’s foreclosing on us. We got to be out by the weekend.”

  For a moment he was speechless. “… I … Jesus, Becca.”

  She sat there and watched him. He could think of nothing to say, so he just said, “I had no idea.”

  “Well, Dennis ain’t been paid for a long time before he was killed, and he sure as shit hadn’t been paid since then, so I guess anybody ought to of seen this comin.”

  He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. He didn’t know if she’d meant it as an accusation, but it felt like one. It didn’t help that it was true. He looked at the orange soda in the glass, a weird dash of cheerful color in all this gloom. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “What are you gonna do?”

  “Well,” she said, staring at her fingers as they twined around each other, “I don’t really know, Jeremy. My mama lives out by Hickory but that’s a ways away, and she don’t have enough room in her house for all of us. Dennis ain’t spoke with his family in years. These boys don’t even know their grandparents on his sid
e.”

  He nodded. In the other room, the boys were quiet, no doubt listening in.

  “I need some money, Jeremy. I mean I need it real bad. We got to be out of here in four days and we don’t have nowhere to go.” She looked up at the clock on the wall, a big round one with Roman numerals, a bright basket of fruit painted in the center. “I’m gonna lose all my things,” she said. She wiped at the corner of an eye with the inside of her wrist.

  Jeremy felt the twist in his gut, like his insides were being spooled on a wheel. He had to close his eyes and ride it out.

  He’d sat at this table many times while Rebecca cooked for Dennis and for him; he’d been sitting here sharing a six pack with Dennis when the call came from the hospital that their youngest had come early. “Oh, Becca,” he said.

  “I just need a little so we can stay someplace for a few weeks. You know, just until we can figure something out.”

  “Becca, I don’t have it. I just don’t have it. I’m so sorry.”

  “Jeremy, we got nowhere to go!”

  “I don’t have anything. I got collection agencies so far up my ass … Tara and I put the house up, Becca. The bank’s threatening us too. We can’t stay where we are. We’re borrowing just to keep our heads above water.”

  “I can fucking sue you!” she screamed, slapping her hand on the table so hard that the glasses toppled over and spilled orange soda all over the floor. “You owe us! You never paid Dennis, and you owe us! I called a lawyer and he said I can sue your ass for every fucking cent you got!”

  The silence afterward was profound, broken only by the pattering of the soda trickling onto the linoleum floor.