Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  Except for the flies, he couldn’t hear a sound. There was no sound to hear.

  He got up from the bed—hung over from something they’d shot him up with, it felt like—and wandered to the window. Like waking up in a ghost town. Nothing out there to see but dust and corpses and pieces of corpses. None of it seemed real. He might as well be waking up in a video game. Wounded, not a clue, and next thing he was supposed to do was find a weapon and start killing anything that moved.

  Only everything was dead already. Nothing outside was moving. Just him, once he got there.

  Under the hot white eye of the sun, Enrique trudged toward the bodies. They’d really cleaned house before they’d abandoned the place, hadn’t they? Finished what they’d started, wrapping it up in a hurry, then bugging out fast. Maybe this was normal for them, treating places like a landfill, and when the bodies piled up too high, they moved on.

  Most were hanging by their ankles, like bloody laundry, from cables stretched between poles, more than he could count at a glance. Nobody had died easy. Some had just died harder than others. More blood for the vast grave worm that tunneled through their lives, their world, their existence. And sooner or later, all the flies found their way here.

  He trembled like it was twenty degrees instead of a hundred. As he scanned the rows of the dead, he looked for clothing because he couldn’t bring himself to look at faces, and was relieved to see there wasn’t much black, and none of it meant for a stage.

  Lots of black hair, though. Except for the blond guy. Except for Olaf. Olaf the photographer. Whose real name was Oliver, he’d learned in the church, the sort of thing that came out when you were sitting around killing time waiting to see who was next to be killed. Said he got more gigs as Olaf than he ever had as Oliver—a man who knew how the game was played.

  Yet here he was.

  Enrique checked for a smaller body, half of it hair, but Morgan wasn’t among them. He was past deciding whether something was good or bad anymore. Maybe all that was left was bad right now, and bad deferred to later.

  Like that empty spot where the towering Santa Muerte had stood. Did you just pack up a thing like that and move it? Was something like that really a priority? You’d need two strong guys just to carry the scythe.

  Because no way had he seen what he thought he had there at the end. That priest had found some other way to get cut in half.

  He turned his attention to the church. The pair of front doors was secured with a heavy, squared-off crossbar. Before he wrestled it from its brackets, he stooped to gather what was waiting, what had plainly been placed here for him to find. Three phones, plus a charger. When he tried his own, it was dead. When he tried the others, they were dead too.

  But better the phones than Sofia and Sebastián.

  He found them inside huddled along the far wall. Before they saw it was him, they scurried back farther, reacting only to the opening of the door, the way you learned to live in a place like this, where a few more millimeters might mean another second of life.

  No sign of Morgan, though. She was just … gone.

  When he went to Sofia and Bas, they felt real enough, sounded real enough, even if it felt like something was missing. Everybody too far gone at this point for a show of relief, let alone jubilation. How was he supposed to bring them back to themselves? How were they supposed to bring him back? There were no manuals for this. There was only standing. There was putting one foot after another. There was holding hands and holding close. There was making your way back into the sunshine, in spite of what it showed.

  It would’ve been easier if the Skull had left a note, some validation of why they were still alive. But maybe the mere fact they were breathing was all the note he would ever need: Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep looking. Like skin, there’s always another layer deeper to go.

  Yeah. Like he wanted any part of that. Like he didn’t want to wipe his memory clean of everything about these past few days. Like he wouldn’t do anything to hit the reset switch and go back a week.

  No, longer than that—go back two years, take those first conceptual sketches for La máscara detrás de la cara and throw them out. Hope that some intuitive voice inside would tell him stop right now, you don’t want to start looking behind that succession of masks and faces, and hope he’d have the balls to listen.

  “How are we getting out of here?” Sofia said. “They could’ve at least left us one of the cars.”

  All they could do was charge one of the dead phones, try using it to get a fix on where they were, then relay the information to whoever they could raise. Sebastián had a GPS app on his, so they put him in charge of finding the nearest electrical outlet. They would’ve anyway, because if Bas didn’t have something to do, he was going to keep falling apart a little more at a time.

  Enrique knew the feeling. You couldn’t stand around waiting. You had to do something, anything. He pointed to the church’s open bell tower, said to Sofia come on, they should get up there, take the high ground and see if they could spot a landmark, more than they could see from down below.

  They found the roof access tucked off a hallway inside, like a closet with a ladder affixed to the wall, stuffy as a chimney the higher they climbed. A trapdoor put them topside. The bell still hung mounted on a wooden headstock, no sign of the rope used for ringing it. Sofia gave it a rap with her knuckles to summon a sad, hollow clunk.

  The bell sounded as dead as everything else looked, as far as he could see.

  They were on an observation deck with nothing left to observe, a seared land scraped thin across a rocky world in a dozen shades of brown, barren of everything but scattered shacks and ruins. To the east, a line of green struggled to overcome, life trying to hang on beside an arroyo, maybe. He wished it well.

  The sky, the blue of dreams, was the only vibrant thing to see. They hadn’t killed the sky yet. Give them time, and enough guns and blades and poison, and they would find a way.

  Sofia saw it first, pointing it out in the distance, nearly at the limits of his vision. His soul knew what it was before his mind let him believe his eyes. Even lost amid a simmering hellscape stretching for the horizon, it towered against the rugged desert hills, crossed gullies and washes in a single step, this striding colossus with bone for a face and a scythe in its hands and hunger in whatever passed for its heart.

  She was, he realized, too terrible and too true not to have been real all along. And he feared she wouldn’t stop until she’d visited every square inch of this land and gathered up her due.

  Something had gone wrong here. Hundreds of years ago, or maybe thousands. No wonder it had always wanted their blood. That was where the memory lingered most.

  They watched until its saint passed from view, beyond the farthest hills, then turned to each other again. Sofia touched his face like she’d never truly seen it before, and when he touched hers, the thing that hurt most was knowing that under the skin, the two of them looked more alike than not, and the same as everybody else.

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  After getting smacked in the face enough times with enough articles about kidnappings in Mexico, it settled over me that I should do a story about one. My Folder of Vague Intentions for it brooded on the hard drive for a few years, slowly attracting affiliates: the skyrocketing devotion to Santa Muerte; the rising rate of exorcisms in Mexico; the Matamoros cult killings of the 1980s; a few photos of MS-13 members, both alive and extremely dead.

  The speed bump in the way was angle, direction. The prime mover behind most of these elements is the drug trade and cartel wars, and I didn’t want to tread ground that authors like Don Winslow were always going to tread better.

  Enter Hocico. Finally.

  For the past 15 years, the hard-electro band Hocico has been a personal favorite—two guys who have made music their inflammation response to growing up in Mexico City.

  I began thinking of a band very much in their mold; indeed, named after
one of their early albums. What if they knew things? What if they managed to tap into a current of understanding that they themselves didn’t understand? What if somebody from a world they want nothing to do with believed they knew things?

  Once you have your victims and your motive, you have your crime. After that, it’s just a matter of watching it play out and expecting the worst.

  REPRISING HER ROLE

  BRACKEN MACLEOD

  From Splatterpunk Zine #8

  Editor: Jack Bantry

  Ignacio thought the girl on the bed looked familiar, but then the glassy-eyed heroin slackness made them all look alike. Not that it mattered. She was a prop, not a performer.

  He checked the setup again through the LCD monitor. The key light was too close; it washed out the scene and made the set look too clean. Not clean, exactly. The hardest part of Ignacio’s job was making something dirty look even dirtier. Without looking directly at the girl, he stepped around the camera and pulled the light back to soften its glare and create deeper shadows that would add needed contrast to the scene. Otherwise, when he inserted the grain effect in post to simulate film instead of digital video, the actress’ facial expressions would be lost in the noise. While the audience for this masterpiece would likely be looking elsewhere in the frame for most of the scene, he knew that her face was important. Her expressions sold what was happening, made it look real to a skeptical viewer. And “reality” was what people wanted. In the sense of a “real life” Alaskan trucker series or a pawn shop show. What they were filming couldn’t look like a reenactment, but it had to have just enough doubt to let the viewer feel like they’d come within a safe distance of something terrifying. The people who bought Byron Blank’s movies at conventions wanted them to look as real as possible, but not actually be real. They wanted the production to do the work of suspending disbelief for them so they could watch a couple of dudes tearing up a girl and at the end still feel like they hadn’t been complicit in an actual atrocity. And that meant that it had to look just fake enough.

  That was the problem.

  “Vérité is context, not content,” Byron liked to say. “What passes for authentic is what people expect reality to look like, not what it actually does.” Ignacio’s job was made easier and more difficult by the fact that people had their own opinions about what looked real, and those were almost always informed by entertainment instead of experience. Making something authentic look fake enough to convince people it was only almost real took work.

  The men who’d dropped the girl on the bed a few minutes ago returned in wardrobe, wearing featureless white masks. A violent shiver rippled up Ignacio’s spine. He worried that they noticed his discomfort. Detached aloofness to what happened on set was the only appropriate response from behind the production line.

  Through the viewfinder, Ignacio studied the girl. He still couldn’t place where he’d seen her before. She was pale as a corpse and as almost as still.

  While the set depicted a nice, teen girl’s bedroom, this girl didn’t fit in it at all. Maybe once she might’ve, but not now. Not with the scar and the heroin dimness in her eyes. She looked like the person the girl who inhabited this room would become in the aftermath of what they were about to shoot.

  “The fuck is wrong with her?” Byron shouted as he walked onto the set.

  “She’s so pumped full of slag she won’t notice a thing. We’re going to have to do ADR in post,” Ignacio said.

  “No dubbing!” Byron shifted his focus to the masked performers. “You two make sure she hits her lines, okay?” One thug gave a thumbs up; his other hand was occupied with the front of his trousers.

  “And you. No fancy camera shit. Just what they pay for.” Ignacio could have easily set up a three camera shoot and cut together the scene using the best footage from each angle. Really made something to be proud of. One camera, one take, one static shot. No artifice. “Vérité is context—”

  “Not content,” Ignacio finished. “Gotcha, Jefé. Hands off.” Whatever gets you through it, he thought. Detachment is self-deception, not distance. The viewers wanted their brand of role-play porn looking a certain way. Most of the time Ignacio shot brother/sister or mother and step-son role play, and left the “forced” stuff to the Russians. But every once in a while, Byron wanted to wander outside of his demesne and go slumming.

  Byron took his seat next to the camera and motioned for the men to stand ready. He looked at Ignacio who gave a weak nod. “Action!

  Ignacio leaned over the camera cupping his hands on either side of his eyes to better see the monitor, and wishing he still had The Mic Drop reality show gig. On the tiny screen he watched the men move toward the bed. The bigger of the two grasped the girl’s ashy blonde hair, yanking her up from where she lay on the mattress. Her face remained slack except for lips peeled back in a grimace. The sound of the man’s hand slapping her cracked in Ignacio’s headphones. He flinched and feared bumping the camera. Resetting the shot was unacceptable. He could put in a false video defect so viewers could process the jump without being taken out of the narrative. Thank you, David Fincher! Too much of that and it started to look intentional. That kind of contrivance was the kind of thing that could cost him future gigs, and he had a food and rent habit he was unwilling to give up.

  No edits. Stay cool. Stay pro.

  The next hit was followed by a deep woof of air as a fist slammed into her stomach. But that was still it. No screams. Byron wanted screams.

  A sound like tearing canvas crackled through the headphones; Ignacio leaned closer to get a look. Blood painted the woman’s pale legs followed by a pile of intestine. He finally remembered the girl.

  That can’t be her. We killed her.

  The smaller man took a step back. A smell of shit and bile rolled off the set like a fog over the bay. Ignacio stood confused and blinking. He hadn’t worked an SFX film since he was a P.A. on the second unit crew for Wicked Season, and he’d gotten his fill of pig intestine on that shoot. Never again. But there wasn’t a make-up creator on this shoot, and he sure as hell hadn’t set up an effect. This wasn’t even a real film. Just a porno scene. Something to sell to desperate men who thought that if it looked amateur enough, they were getting something unfiltered and forbidden.

  The girl stood up, dropping the guts to the floor. She craned her neck around, leering at the camera like she expected Ignacio to zoom in for a close up glamour shot. Her teeth clacked in his headphones.

  None of it was right. None of it was in the script.

  Finally, a full-throated shriek broke the silence, crackling in Ignacio’s headset. One of the performers stripped off his mask and clawed at the girl, trying to get her back on the bed. She wouldn’t move. His partner screamed and fell to his knees, trying to gather up his intestines and shove them back in his stomach. The slick viscera kept spilling out over his hands; he fumbled at them, clumsily juggling himself as his tears dripped from beneath his mask, splashing in the spreading gore below. Ignacio heard the thug sobbing and ask for his mother.

  Byron ran into frame and tried to grab the woman. Before he could think about what he was saying, Ignacio shouted at him to stop, that he was “ruining the shot.” But everything was already ruined. Byron started to shout but his words were cut off before he got more than a word out. Ignacio stepped back and looked up from the monitor at the set to see the woman holding the director by his neck with a bony red hand. Ignacio tried to process what he was seeing; none of it made sense. The expression on her face and the light in her eyes was brighter and more focused than ever.

  The full, unfiltered experience of the room settled down over him, the sights, the sounds, the smells. Everything he distanced himself from with the camera as mediator was right in front of him, exposed. The reality of the scene revealed itself like an opaque vinyl strip curtain being pulled back to reveal the cruelty of a charnel house. Byron pulled a pistol from inside his sport coat and aimed it at the woman’s face. Instead of a shot, Ignacio heard
a sound like he’d never heard before. It certainly wasn’t like the stock sound effects he heard in the movies when an action hero broke the bad guy’s neck. This sound was wetter. It popped and ground and a low aborted groan escaped Byron’s throat. It sounded just like she had when he first saw her through his camera. It sounded like a person dying.

  Ignacio ran tripping over cords and cables, getting caught up in them like a moth in a web. The camera and tripod clattered at his heels before getting caught in the doorway and tearing free from the headphone cable dangling from the clamshells still around his neck. He sprinted home, not caring about his equipment, car, or how people stopped and stared at the screaming man tearing up the street in the bright day light.

  ___

  Ignacio slammed his apartment door, locked it, and doubting what he’d just done, unlocked it and threw the bolt again, just to make sure. He couldn’t get a breath and his lungs burned, still, he raced to his bedroom and clawed out the false wall panel in the back of his closet. Dragging out a lockbox, he fumbled at the key pad until getting the code right on the third try and the lock clicked open. Inside, He found the fake Mexican passport his friend in the Art Department at TurnaЯound Films had made for him. It wasn’t perfect, but he figured it’d be convincing enough with a couple of hundreds stuffed inside. And he never intended to use it—not unless what was on the flash drive underneath it got out.

  Got out.

  She can’t get out.

  He picked the memory stick out of the lockbox with trembling fingers and crept back to the living room. He stuck the thing into the port on the side of his sixty-inch television, and stepping back, pointed the remote at the TV. He hesitated, working up the will to click on the only file on the drive: CHKR.M4P.

  The screen went black, replaced a second later with a view of the interior of a foreclosed house. A man in a black leather mask walked into the room and shoved a slender woman with ashy blonde hair onto the bed. After a few minutes of reluctant role-play bordering on the real thing, the actors seemed to pause as if unsure what to do next. Though the viewers didn’t want that kind of intimacy, Ignacio had zoomed in on the woman’s face. The man’s thick white knuckles were visible below her jaw, his fingers white and her face purpling. The key light reflected in the tears that trembled at the edges of her eyelids. The image was real and terrifying and Ignacio was frozen, staring into them on his monitor. Something told him to look closer. Get her eyes on camera. Nothing said to him, nudge Byron. Get him to yell cut. Go over and stop it. Instead, he stared.