The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  He had been gone. Impossible as it was to contemplate, sometime between asking her to take care of his charges and their encounter outside the tiger enclosures, he had died, and kept on walking.

  “No,” said Cassandra. She grabbed for the hydrogen peroxide bottle and emptied it over the wound. It foamed and bubbled and stung like anything, like it was supposed to, but the feeling of rotten wrongness remained, worming its way down toward the bone. “No, no, no. No.”

  No amount of denial would heal the wound in her arm, or chase the smell of decay from her arm. Time seemed to jump again, taking her along with it: this time, when the haze cleared, she was applying butterfly clips to the gauze encircling her arm, sealing the bite marks out of sight. They continued to throb. Out of sight was not out of mind.

  “No,” said Cassandra, somewhat more firmly. She shook her head, trying to prevent another jump. What was this?

  Think about it logically. Think about it like a biologist. Yes: that was the ticket. Think about it like she was back in class, like the worst that could come from getting the answer wrong was a bad grade.

  Michael’s roommate had been acting strange this morning. Michael had come to work with a bite from that roommate fresh on his arm. Michael had been behaving normally. Now Michael was acting like the man from the moat, and he had bitten her. Michael smelled of decay.

  The man in the moat had smelled of decay when she had found him; her first impression had been that he was dead, yet somehow still standing. He was wearing the uniform of the night groundskeepers. She had seen wounds on him, but they had all been consistent with sliding down the side of the rocky wall between the fence line and the ground. What if nothing had bitten him? What if he’d just … fallen? It was always a risk, especially when the staff had to lean over the low retaining wall to retrieve something from the moat’s edge. There had been falls before.

  The woman, the security guard … the man from the moat had bitten her. He had torn her throat out with her teeth, and she had died. Cassandra had no doubt at all that the woman had died. She’d seen it. But after dying, she had started moving again, attacking another member of her team. So what if …

  What if the man in the moat had died, only to come back again as something that wasn’t quite human anymore? Sometime dead and terrible, that looked like a human being but smelled like the grave, and only wanted to … what? Feed? Bite?

  Pass the … curse, infection, whatever it was along?

  Cassandra turned to look at the bandage on her own arm. Michael hadn’t died. Not like the woman. Michael had been fine. Human mouths were filthy things, but a bite wouldn’t be enough to kill a healthy man, not under ordinary circumstances. She could feel the hot pulsing buried deep in her flesh, telling her that something was very, very wrong. Whatever had been in him, it was in her now too. Hurting her. Maybe killing her.

  “Okay,” she said, as much to hear her own voice as for any other reason. “I need to get out of here.” Michael’s mistake had been coming to work instead of going to the doctor. Doctors could flush the wound, could make things better. Could fix it.

  She had long since accepted the fact that one mistake at her job could put her in the ground. But she wasn’t going to die like this.

  Feeling better now that she had a plan, Cassandra started for the door. She needed to get to the locker room, to retrieve her purse and her car keys. She would tell Dan that it didn’t matter whether he closed the zoo today, because she wouldn’t be here either way. She would be at the doctor’s office, getting the flesh on her arm debrided and patched up, until the hot pulsing from within stopped. Until she wasn’t scared anymore.

  The tigers paced and muttered in their deep feline voices as she passed them, expressing their displeasure with the whole situation. Cassandra smiled wanly.

  “I need to be sure the dead man isn’t in front of your enclosure anymore before I let you out,” she said. “If he fell back in, that would only upset you. I’ll make sure someone comes to open the gates, I promise.”

  The tigers didn’t speak English, but she had been their handler for years. Most stopped grumbling and just looked at her, staring with their wide amber eyes. They trusted her, as much as one apex predator could trust another.

  “I promise,” Cassandra said again, and opened the door to the outside.

  The smell of decay was like an assault. Behind her, the tigers roared and snarled, protesting this invasion. She couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t have to mean anything: not when she could smell them.

  The zoo grounds had never seemed so claustrophobic before, so crowded with thick bushes and copses of trees. How many dead people could be lurking in there?

  This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening. She would get to the locker room, get her purse, and drive herself to the hospital. Maybe stop long enough to make a few phone calls, to make sure that whatever was going on at the zoo was only going on at the zoo. Michael’s roommate was confined to their apartment, right? And Michael could have been exposed here, at work, picking up some … some novel parasite or tropical disease from one of the animals. Spillover diseases didn’t always look the same in people as they did in their original hosts. This could be, could be a flu, or a respiratory illness, or something, that behaved in a new, terrifying way when it got into a human being. It could be—

  Cassandra crested the hill and froze, getting her first look at the zoo’s entry plaza.

  They had opened the gates after all. Sometime between her leaving Dan’s office and coming to in the back hall of the big cat building, someone had turned on the carousel and opened the gates, letting the public—letting the dead—come to the zoo one last time. Bodies thronged around the admin buildings, moving with that same odd, graceless hitch that she had seen in Michael, before he had attacked her. Whatever this was, it was spreading with horrific speed. Based on what she’d seen in front of the tiger enclosure, it wasn’t unreasonable to think that it was spreading to everyone who was bitten.

  Including her. She had been bitten. It was spreading—it had spread—to her. Maybe that would protect her. If this was a disease, they might not attack someone who had already been infected. There was no sense in taking chances: if she got killed, who would take care of the tigers? They were trapped, penned in their little cages, without even the freedom of their enclosures to enjoy. She needed to make it back to them, now more than ever. But she also needed to see. She had to.

  Carefully, Cassandra crept closer, sticking to the edges of the underbrush, where she might be ambushed, but she was less likely to be seen. When she came to one of the staff gates in the fence, she opened it and slipped through, relieved to see that the path was clear. These pathways were mostly used to transport things—food, equipment, sick animals—during the day; until the crowds got thick around noon, even the most privacy-loving zookeepers would tend to stick to the public side of the zoo. Maybe she could get to the gates without further incident.

  Maybe it wouldn’t matter.

  The throbbing from her arm was getting worse and worse, reminding her with every step that this was how it had started for Michael. Whatever this was, it spread through the bites. If she didn’t get medical help soon, she was going to become like them: dead, but still moving, still standing. Still biting. She was going to become a dangerous predator, something both more than animal and less than human.

  The path ended at a slatted gate looking out over the zoo’s front plaza. The merry-go-round was running, the painted horses dancing up and down in their eternal slow ballet. Cassandra stopped a few feet back, looking silently at the crowd that pressed around the classic amusement. They swayed and shambled, eyes glazed over and focusing on nothing. The smell that rose from their bodies was thick and undeniable, the smell of death, the smell of things decaying where they stood.

  There had been people riding the merry-go-round when … whatever had happened here had happened. Some of them were still tangled in their
safety belts, dangling from their painted horses, unable to free themselves as they pawed mindlessly at the air. Cassandra’s stomach churned, bile rising in the back of her throat.

  Soon that will be me, she thought. Soon I will be one of them.

  What would happen to her tigers then? What would happen to Michael’s otters, or Betsy’s zebras, or any of the other animals in the zoo? Some of them were already doomed, unable to survive in this ecosystem, but others …

  She could see the parking lot from her current position. There were dead, shambling people moving there, too. As she watched, a group of them caught up with a screaming man and drove him to the ground, where he vanished beneath a hail of bodies. This wasn’t contained to the zoo. This could never have been contained.

  Cassandra turned her back on the scene in the front plaza. She had work to do.

  Any disease that hit this hard and spread this exponentially was going to overwhelm the city in a matter of hours: that was just simple math. One was bad; two was worse; four was a disaster. The numbers kept climbing from there, until she reached the point where the dead outnumbered the living, and there was nothing left to do but die.

  If she hadn’t been bitten, she might have tried to find another way. The big cat house, especially, had hundreds of pounds of raw meat stored in the freezers, just in case, and doors that were designed to stand up to a raging male lion. She could have locked herself inside with her beloved cats. She could have tried to wait it out.

  But her arm burned, throbbing with every heartbeat, and she was starting to feel … bad. Feverish. Like she wanted nothing more than to lay down for a nap, to close her eyes and let her body finish the transition it was clearly aching to undergo. She needed to act quickly, before she was no longer equipped to act at all.

  She began with the herbivores. She opened doors and propped gates, leaving the avenues of escape open for anything that wanted to take them. By the time she made her way to the aviary, there were zebras cropping at the lawn, ears flicking wildly back and forth as they scanned for danger. A kangaroo went bounding away down a side path, all but flying in its haste to get away. If there were dead people lurking in the bushes, they weren’t fast enough to catch it.

  The birds knew something was wrong. As she opened their cages, they flew away, wings clawing at the air, and were gone. Some of them would make it. Some of them had to make it.

  Slowly, almost shambling now, she made her way back to the big cat house. The smell of decay was less noticeable now, maybe because she was adding to it. Maybe because her nose was dying with the rest of her.

  There were so many doors she hadn’t opened. There were so many cages she hadn’t unlocked. But there wasn’t time, and she didn’t want to endanger her animals. Not in the end. Not when the burning in her arm had become nothing more than a dull and distant throb, like the nerves were giving up.

  The tigers stopped their pacing when she came into view, staring at her silently. Cassandra pulled out her keys.

  “Try … not to eat me, okay?” she rasped, and started down the line of cages. One by one, she unlocked them, leaving them standing open. When she finished with the tigers, she began releasing the lions, the cheetahs, until she was at the end of the hallway with a dozen massive predators between her and freedom. They looked at her. She looked at them.

  One by one, they turned and walked away, heading for the open door; heading for freedom. Cassandra followed them until she reached the main door to the tiger enclosure. Her fingers didn’t want to cooperate, didn’t want to work the key or let her turn the lock. She fought through the numbness, until the bolt clicked open and she stepped through, into the open air on the other side.

  The door, unbraced, swung shut and locked itself behind her. Cassandra didn’t care.

  Stumbling, she walked across the uneven ground to the rock where her big male liked to sun himself during the hottest hours of the day. She sat down. She closed her eyes. In the distance, the merry-go-round played on, a soft counterpart to the slowing tempo of her heart.

  Cassandra stayed where she was, and waited for the music to stop.

  NO MATTER WHICH WAY

  WE TURNED

  BRIAN EVENSON

  No matter which way we turned the girl, she didn’t have a face. There was hair in front and hair in the back—only saying which was the front and which was the back was impossible. I got Jim Slip to look on one side and I looked from the other and the other members of the lodge just tried to hold her gently or not so gently in place, but no matter how we looked or held her the face just wasn’t there. Her mother was screaming, blaming us, but what could we do about it? We were not to blame. There was nothing we could have done.

  It was Verl Kramm who got the idea of calling out to the sky, calling out after the lights as they receded, to tell them to come and take her. You’ve taken half of her, he shouted. You’ve taken the same half of her twice. Now goddam have the decency to take the rest of her.

  Some of the others joined in, but they didn’t come back, none of them. They left and left us with a girl who, no matter how you looked at her, you saw her from the back. She didn’t eat or if she did, did so in a way we couldn’t see. She just kept turning in circles, walking backwards and knocking into things, trying to grab things with the backs of her hands. She was a whole girl made of two half girls, but wrongly made, of two of the same halves.

  After a while we couldn’t hardly bear to look at her. In the end we couldn’t think what to do with her except leave her. At first her mother protested and bit and clawed, but in the end she didn’t want to take her either—she just wanted to feel better about letting her go, to have the blame rest on us.

  We nailed planks across the door and boarded up the windows. At Verl’s request, we left the hole in the roof in the hopes they would come back for her. For a while we posted a sentry outside the door, who reported to the lodge on the sound of her scrabbling within, but once the noise stopped we gave that up as well.

  Late at night, I dreamed of her, not the doubled half of the girl we had, but the doubled half we didn’t. I saw her, miles above us, in air rarefied and thin, not breathable by common means at all, floating within their vessel. There she was, a girl who, no matter where you turned, always faced you. A girl who bared her teeth and stared, stared.

  NESTERS

  SIOBHAN CARROLL

  They killed the last calf that morning. Ma wanted to hold off, give the poor thing a chance, but Pa said it were cruel to let a body live like that. He cracked the hammer on its head—a sick, sad sound. Later he slit the calf open and showed Sally the animal’s stomach, choked with dust. “Suffocated from the inside,” he said.

  Sally cried, or would have cried, but her face was too caked with dirt. The Vaseline in her nostrils couldn’t keep it out. She wondered how much dirt was in her stomach and whether her body was already full of it, like the calf, her tears and blood just rivers of dust. But when she asked, Ma said, “Jaisus, quit nattering and help the bairn.” So Sally did, even though her baby brother was curled up like the calf had been, under a skin of dust that never went away no matter how they cleaned.

  Sally followed Ma round the dugout, stuffing rags into the cracks where the dust had trickled through. Alice toddled after her. Ben watched from the bed, his feverish eyes glistening. At fourteen, he was taller than Sally and better at reaching the upper cracks. But what could be done? The dust-lung had him. If Ben were to move, Ma said it would be to her sister’s place in Topeka, away from the land that was killing him. Better still, Ma said, would be to head out to California, where there was still work to be had.

  But Pa had heard about the cities. Many who went there came home poorer than before. They told tales of Hoover camps, the shame of being spat on by city-dwellers. At least here they suffered together. At least here they had the land.

  To lose your land was to lose yourself, her father had warned her and Ben. This was in the early years, when folks still thought next year would brin
g the rains back.

  “This here’s the first thing our family’s ever owned in this country,” he’d said, showing Sally the dark soil between his fingers. “Mackay land.” His eyes had shone with the wonder of it.

  Now the earth was hard and brown and dusters turned the sky the same color, choking and fierce. “Still,” said Pa, “we have the land. We lost it once to the English. We won’t lose it to the wind.”

  Two strangers were at the gate. Sally could see right off they weren’t farmers. Too pale. Too well-fed.

  The taller man leaned forward, dangling his hands into the yard in a way Sally didn’t like. “Your father at home, sweetheart?”

  Sally looked the stranger up and down, the starving chickens pecking at her feet. “You from Washington?” There was talk of Mr. Roosevelt sending folk to tell the Nesters how to run their farms. This man, with his clean suit, seemed like he could be one of them.

  A glance from the leaning man to his companion. “What d’ya think, Bill? Are we from Washington?”

  The older man looked like a schoolteacher, one of the impatient ones who rapped kids’ knuckles. “We’re on official business,” he said. “We’re looking for the man of the house.”

  Sally knew Ma would scold her if she let a government man pass by, even rude ones. There might be a dime in it, and a dime could buy bread.

  “I’ll fetch him then,” she said. “Best come out of the blow.”

  At the dugout’s entrance, Ma’s face already showed the strain of a smile. Sally knew Ma was thinking of rusted cans of water instead of tea, the assistance bread gone hard by week’s end. At least they had some milk to offer, thanks to the dead calf. Still, it was as much her mother’s smile as the need to fetch her father that made her run so quickly.