by Ellen Datlow
* * *
“Why didn’t you tell me the theme?” Frances holds up quote fingers around “the theme.” “Am I making too much of this? I don’t think I am. You had weeks to tell me.”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? There has to be a reason. Did you think I’d make fun of it or say I wouldn’t want to go?”
“I really don’t know.”
“I don’t get how you don’t know.”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“You could’ve told me when we got here. You could’ve told me when that guy brought you ‘The End’ drink? Jesus, why not tell me then?”
“Look, I’m sorry. You know how I get before social gatherings and my answer isn’t going to change even if you keep asking.”
“What about the collecting phones thing? You left your phone in the car. I saw you do it. Why not warn me about that? I mean, it’s like you brought me to a—to a secret cult party.”
“Seriously? You’re being ridiculous.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. ‘Secret cult party’ was last year’s theme.”
“I knew it. Total cult. Work People Cult. You have your glass of Jim Jones juice. Plus that Caligula toast/speech she made. And the shit about being in the aquarium is more than kind of fucked up.”
“Now you’re being a jerk. I can’t even deal with you right now.” Jacqui’s arms are crossed over her chest and she smirks, likely trying to appear more bemused than she actually is.
“Fine. I’ll stop. But there’s no way we’re culting here overnight.”
“Yes, I know. Give me a little fucking credit.”
Frances has pushed far enough, if not too far. Their brief but intense argument ran its course from stung feelings to resigned attempts at humor but is in danger of heading back out toward hurt again. She shakes her empty beer bottle regretfully. “If I go outside to smoke will I be the first one sacrificed?”
“Only if we’re lucky.”
* * *
Past the kitchen and down a narrow hallway, Frances finds the bedroom currently serving as the coatroom.
The ceiling lamp has been left on, but the fog of decorative frosted glass dims the light. The walls above the wainscotting are creamy yellow. The darkly stained headboard, the prow of the king-sized bed, claims much of the rear wall. Guest coats and jackets have been carefully if not obsessively arranged atop the white duvet-covered mattress. The number of coats is overwhelming. Are there that many people here? And there’s something about the way the coats are laid out, like trophied pelts. She makes a mental note to make a joke to Jacqui later that she would’ve been back to the party sooner but finding her coat was like finding a needle at an archaeologist’s dig site. She finds her overcoat right away though and retrieves her cigarettes and lighter.
Across from the bed, tucked into a corner of the room and beneath a large window, is a sitting area; plush chair, small bookcase, and a circular, one-post, wooden table. Atop the table is, well—she’s not sure what it is. The red, lumpen, smooth-surfaced thing is shaped like a strawberry yet is the size of a birthday cake. Bigger, actually. Frances decides it is a cake as she walks around the bed to the sitting area.
With the cake designation clear in her mind, she assumes the red exterior is fondant icing, but upon closer inspection the surface isn’t smooth. The longer she looks, the more organic the thing appears, although there is no sign of stem or stalk. There are random patches with small, raised bumps and with black dot-like pits, or pores in its skin. She does think of the outer layer as a skin. Sitting briefly in the plush chair, she wonders if the skin would be as soft as the cushion beneath her, or crusted and hard. There’s a sickly-sweet compost smell, almost smokey, that initially stings her eyes with its unpleasantness. She quickly becomes used to it. Beneath the object is a porcelain platter or serving dish, and pooled at the object’s base is a dark red, almost purple, glistening liquid. Frances leaves the chair but maintains a crouch, and maneuvers to the other side of the table, the side facing the window. The skin here is acned with pustules and weeping sores.
Frances stands and shimmies a few fleeing steps away from the sitting area, wringing her hands together absently. She doesn’t turn on a heel and leave the bedroom. She instead returns to the chair, bends, and reaches a finger toward a section that appears the smoothest, the most unblemished. The surface breaks at her touch as though it was made of rice paper. Liquid saps out from a fingertip-sized hole. It felt like touching a rotted tomato, only worse, because it is not a tomato.
* * *
Outside the bedroom and standing in the middle of the hallway is Jeanne. “Did you find everything you need?” she asks.
Frances says, “Yeah,” and holds up her pack of cigarettes with one hand. She wipes her other hand on her jeans. Witty rejoinders die on the pad of her greased fingertip.
“You’re welcome to go out back. I left a standing ashtray at the edge, where the brick meets the grass. It looks like a tall, skinny birdbath. Can’t miss it. The glass doors to the patio are unlocked.”
“Thank you. I will.” Frances walks past Jeanne, almost pressing against the wall to avoid any glancing contact with her.
“I know it’s a lot,” Jeanne says, “but my offer stands for you and Jacqui to stay overnight. You can have my bedroom if you like. I don’t mind.”
* * *
It’s a clear, cold night. Unlike being in the city, bubbled within its desert of light, there are stars visible in the sky. Some of the pinpricks of light are larger than others. Some flicker and waver, others are hard, steadfast, unblinking.
A breeze enables the grass and trees to speak. Standing at the edge of the bricked patio but not on the grass—she will not step onto the grass—her back to the house, Frances stares into the wooded lot. The ankle-high grass leads to a thick grove of trees. She does not look at their heights and tops and wonder how long the trees have lived, how long they have left to live. She instead strains to identify the mishappen mounds crowding around the bases of their trunks until she can’t bear to stare at them any longer.
Can anyone from the party see her out here? Would she, undetected, be able to watch them revel while in—how did Jeanne put it?—their aquarium?
Frances mutters, “Shouldn’t it be a terrarium, Jeanne?” She throws the cigarette butt onto the grass and not the ashtray. A small act of defiance, one that twitches a smile.
Frances turns around and looks inside the teeming, glowing house. Jeanne and Jacqui are standing together by the patio doors and looking out into the yard, presumably at Frances. They are far enough away that their faces are featureless blurs. Judging by the hand gestures and her bobbing head, Jeanne is doing all the talking.
The man with the drink tray comes by and offers Jacqui another red glass of The End. She takes it. She raises the tumbler in the air, tipping it out toward Frances, toasting her.
Refinery Road
Stephen Graham Jones
YEARS later, at a trivia game in the bar of the hotel Jensen’s company had him at for three days, An Officer and a Gentleman would roll up on every screen. The title and the poster both. The movie was the answer to whatever the obscure question had been— Jensen hadn’t really been interested, was just riding out the cheers and groans, trying to finish his drink without getting jostled too much. The room and meals and cab fares were all expensed, but this drink, all nine dollars of it, was his and his alone.
He left it sitting there, along with two singles for the bartender.
It wasn’t because he could have won that round if he’d been quicker on the draw. Even if he’d been tuned in, he wouldn’t have called that movie out. He’d never even finished it. According to the screens still assaulting him from all sides, it was from 1982, Richard Gere and Debra Winger, but when Jensen, seventeen then, had pushed it into his family’s VCR in 1988, he didn’t know Gere or Winger by name, by face, any of that. He just knew he’d liked Top
Gun enough his sophomore year, and according to the back of the box this was another fighter pilot thing, and had been on ninety-nine-cent rental at the grocery store, so why not.
Jensen had just been getting into the movie when Cara called him. The whole time she was telling him where she was, he was staring at An Officer and a Gentleman paused on-screen, the video barely holding on, the tracking lines and static juddering this drill sergeant scene.
It was bad for the tape, but Jensen left it paused like that all the same.
Why Cara needed Jensen to pick her up now now now was that when she’d come home with a tattoo of her dead little brother’s name on the inside of her left wrist, so she could touch it with the fingertips of her right hand, her dad had lost it, called her every name he had coiled up inside, and when Cara finally ran out the front door he’d fired his welding truck up, chased her through all the empty lots on their block, trying to run her down. He only stopped when she stumbled across the railroad tracks and his truck was too long, high-centered on the rails, both the front and back tires spinning in the air.
When Jensen picked her up at the gas station, Cara huddled in, just told him drive, drive, she didn’t want to be here anymore. Her lip was busted. Jensen offered her a tissue from the little pack his mom kept in the center console. He wasn’t supposed to take the Buick out without explicit permission, but this was an emergency. He was already making the argument in his head. But if he got ragged on for taking it, so what. This was Cara, his best friend. She’d been there for him on the playground in fourth grade when he wet his pants, and she’d held his hand once at the mall, to try to make a girl Jensen liked jealous, and when her little brother had overdosed in his bedroom last year, Jensen had held her head to his shoulder for all of one afternoon, and let her hit the side of her fists into his chest and shoulders every few minutes, when it all rose for her again.
They picked Mote up once Cara was calm enough. His parents had decorated the front of their house for Halloween, and the reason Jensen turned the headlights off while Mote was locking his front door was that dads being Halloween decoration-cool like that wasn’t what Cara needed to see right then.
Mote slipped into the back seat like ducking out of a bank he’d just robbed, and that wasn’t all wrong: he had a six of his dad’s beer.
“Where to?” Jensen asked all around. “Just go,” Cara told him.
They made the usual circuit: up the drag, back down the drag, turning around at the auto parts store, but the night was dead. It was Tuesday.
“Let me see,” Mote said, taking Cara by the chin.
He ran the back of his knuckle under her bloodied lip.
“It’s gonna fat up,” he told her, leaning back.
“Thanks, Einstein,” Cara said back, and was just taking his proffered beer when the cop car that they didn’t know had pulled up alongside flashed its light.
“Shit,” Jensen said, both hands finding the wheel.
“Shh, shh,” Mote said.
Cara snaked her bottle down, let it hide alongside her thigh, but the cop hadn’t lit up for them. He was already accelerating away, blasting through the light.
“Go see,” Mote said to Jensen.
“What, are we moths?” Jensen said back. It was what his mom always told him, about being drawn to what she called “episodes of trouble.”
“More like fireflies,” Cara said softly, and Jensen sneaked a look over at her, like her face was going to be as wistful as her voice.
He waited the red light out, followed that cop car, Mote calling out its right turn.
It took them back by the gas station Jensen had picked Cara up at.
“No,” she said, leaning closer to the windshield.
“What?” Jensen asked.
“Where’d he go?” Mote said, leaning over the front seat, his beer dangling from his fingers for all the world to see.
“Left,” Cara said, so certain Jensen could only follow.
They could see the blue and red lights a block and a half before they got there.
It was the train tracks.
Cara’s dad’s welding truck was crumpled, smashed. Jensen knew the trains slowed, coming through town, but even slow was enough to plow through a truck caught up on the tracks.
Jensen turned his headlights off, crept as close as they could get away with.
The firemen were extracting a body from that truck.
“He stayed?” Jensen said, not really believing this.
“He was drinking,” Cara said back flatly, shrugging her left shoulder.
“Shit, your dad, you mean?” Mote said, finally clueing in.
“Serves him right,” Cara said, and before Jensen or Mote could stop her, she was stepping out her side of the car and running forward a few feet to hurl her half-full beer.
She screamed behind it, not words, just anger, and the bottle popped way on the other side of the tracks, drawing all the firemen and cops’ eyes.
They followed the arc that bottle had taken back to Jensen’s mom’s Buick.
“No, no,” Mote said, slumping down as far as he could in the rearview mirror.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Jensen said to Cara, though she was too far to hear him.
She came back all the same, her hands balled at her sides, her gait not nearly urgent enough. The moment she was in, Jensen reversed hard, spun them around in what he hoped wasn’t a guilty manner, and eased away, pulling his headlights back on.
“What were you doing?” he said to Cara.
“I hate him so much,” she said back, reaching to the back seat for another beer.
“Listen, I can just get out—” Mote said, but Jensen turned hard, shutting him up for the moment.
“They’ll all be looking for us now,” he said, and instead of taking them back to the drag, which would be an invitation to get pulled over, he took smaller and less likely streets, all the dead ends and cul-de-sacs finally spitting them up at the city limits.
“Yeah, the sticks,” Mote said. “Great. Wonderful. Nothing bad ever happens out here. Not to people my color.”
“Mine either,” Jensen said.
“But girls are completely safe out here,” Cara said, playing along— almost grinning, even.
Jensen considered her grin: was she even registering what was happening? Her dad was dead. He’d been run over by a train.
Or maybe she was registering it. Maybe that was why she had that grin.
“You good?” he said across to her.
“Excellent,” she said back, looking straight ahead, which kind of put the lie to her words.
Still, “My mom’s going to see the gas gauge,” Jensen said out loud, to break the awkwardness, and for some reason—he’d never figure it out—it was him saying that that made Cara start in crying. Not hard crying, not even letting herself cry, really. But there were tears she couldn’t help slipping down her face, now. She wiped them away, kept her lips pulled in tight, her eyes still so straight ahead.
Jensen knew he should put his hand on her knee, or do something, but the excuse he gave for just driving was that, like his mom said, he was responsible for the lives of everyone in the car, so he couldn’t be distracted, since it only takes a moment of inattention to kill everyone.
“It’s not your fault,” Mote said to Cara, like just stating a fact. “Anyway, he was… I mean, I don’t want to—”
“It’s better this way,” Jensen filled in. “You don’t have to worry about him any more.”
“Yeah,” Mote chimed in, evidently even less sure than Jensen what to say.
“My mom,” Cara said, closing her eyes like for calmness. “First it was my brother, who I was supposed to have been babysitting. And now it’s my dad, who was—”
“He was trying to run you over,” Jensen reminded her.
“Train’s like an act of God,” Mote said. “The world calling in his ticket, yeah? Nothing you did, Care Bear.”
She looked down, sort of grinned again, like t
rying to fake it until it was real, or real enough. When her head came up, she was drinking long from her bottle, like punishing herself.
“He, he—my little brother, I mean,” she said, having to stop to burp. “My grandma showed me the pictures once. He looked just like my dad at that age.”
It was funny to her. Or, she laughed after saying it, anyway.
“That’s where he grew up,” she said, chucking her chin down a dirt road Jensen had never seen.
“Your brother?” Jensen asked.
“My dad,” she said, something disconnected about the way she said it, like she was really just talking to herself.
“Serious?” Mote asked, looking down that dark road.
Jensen slowed so Cara could take a snapshot with her eyes, and then, because there was only blackness opening up before them, he came to a stop, backed up into that road to turn around.
“No, stop!” Mote said. “Headlights!”
Without asking why, Jensen turned them off.
It was just in time for the red and blue lights already coloring the trees to become a cop car, speeding up the road.
“How’d they find us already?” Jensen said, his heart jackhammering awake.
“It’s me they want,” Cara said, her finger to the door handle on her side, like she was going to step out into the road, await judgment.
The instant the dome light glowed on with her door starting to open, Jensen reached across, pulled it shut again, his body seatbelting her in.
“No, no, I have to—!” she said, but now Mote had his hand over her mouth, and Jensen knew that if this cop managed to smear his dummy light through their windshield, it would be obvious what was happening: two guys were abducting this girl, one of them holding her down, the other keeping her quiet.