Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  Fu Chan smiled his approval. ‘That good choice for beginner. You gonna be real great at killing ladies. Fu Chan can always tell.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Special one time offer: ten pounds.’

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  Fu Chan clicked his fingers. A ker-ching sound told Wilbur his bank account had just been debited by the agreed amount. ‘Enjoy.’

  ___

  Wilbur came into work the next day feeling he’d just met himself for the first time in ages and wasn’t at all how he remembered. Who, he wondered as he took his seat in the office, was that last night? Not me, that’s for sure.

  No wonder Mickey Stratton had gone over the edge.

  I can’t let that happen to me. He patted his jacket to reassure himself that the USB stick was still in his pocket. The first chance he got, he was going to destroy the accursed thing.

  ‘It’s only a game.’ Mickey Stratton’s replacement sat down next to Wilbur. Like every new employee, he was bursting with enthusiasm. It wouldn’t last.

  ‘What’s only a game?’ Wilbur replied with undisguised hostility. He had a horrible feeling that he’d been rumbled, that the new guy knew what he’d been up to last night.

  The new guy waved his hand in the direction of his screen. ‘All this. Playing the markets.’

  ‘A game? Say that to someone in senior management and count the seconds before your arse meets the pavement.’

  ‘OK. I know it’s not really a game. It’s way more serious than that. What I mean is that you’ve got to treat it like a game. Otherwise you’ll go mad.’

  Wilbur felt bile rise in his throat and blamed the new guy with his youthful exuberance and unrelenting naivety. He’d been in the job six years now; he didn’t need some punk barely out of nappies telling him how to do his job.

  He might have given voice to his disgust had Isabella Holder not chosen that moment to arrive. With no thought for decorum or etiquette, she rapidly opened and closed her umbrella, spraying Wilbur and the new guy with water. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, sounding not sorry at all. ‘Got caught in the rain. Why does it always happen to me?’

  Isabella threw the umbrella under her desk and took off her coat, which had not been wholly successful in protecting her from the rain. Her damp blouse clung to her bosom, revealing the outline of a black bra.

  Wilbur pictured his hand down that bra. In his mind, his other hand was clamped over Isabella’s mouth while she struggled helplessly.

  Isabella sat down. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘Like what?’ But Wilbur knew. He felt his cheeks flush. He pointedly looked away and stared at his blank screen.

  ‘That’s the way Mickey used to look at me. Like I was a piece of meat. And I can’t say I like it.’

  Wilbur squirmed inwardly. He was saved from further discomfort by the screens coming to life. 50… 49… 48… 47…

  ‘By the way,’ said the new guy. ‘We didn’t get introduced yesterday. My name’s Martin.’

  Wilbur and Isabella responded in unison. ‘Fuck off, Martin.’

  ___

  The girl lay dead at Wilbur’s feet. He wiped the blood from the blade that had killed her and slipped the knife back in its sheath. Then he dragged her by one leg until he had her under the streetlight and could see her face.

  Even in death, it was a pretty face and he was glad he hadn’t bruised it too much.

  If only it hadn’t been so easy to kill her. For a while now, Wilbur had been nursing the suspicion that he was getting too good for Slut Slayer. The first time he’d tried it, his intended victim had managed to get away unscathed. His next target put up a hell of a fight and for a while it had seemed all too possible that she would get the better of him.

  After that, he’d been more careful and planned his attacks in advance. He knew how to sneak up on his victims, how to charm them, how to talk them into going to isolated spots with him, how to drug them, how to evade the police, how to stop them screaming. In fact, now that he’d played the game nigh on a hundred times, it seemed to him he was now the perfect slut slayer, which was a problem.

  How long, he wondered, before the game ceased to entertain him? What would he do then? Move on to a better, more extreme game? Something that stretched his abilities and offered greater rewards than the slaughter of fallen women?

  Did such a game even exist? He doubted it.

  Determined to get his money’s worth, Wilbur reached for his knife only to find it gone. A quick forage in his pockets confirmed that his knuckleduster had also disappeared.

  He could only watch in grim acceptance as the dead girl faded into nothingness.

  It should have been his cue to exit the game and step back to reality, but he wasn’t about to do that just yet. Not until his cravings had been satisfied.

  He was going to have to get new weapons.

  One of the magical things about the world of Slut Slayer was that the armoury was never far away. All Wilbur had to do was picture the place and step through the nearest door.

  ‘Ah, Mr. Wilbur,’ said Fu Chan, bowing deeply. ‘How nice to see you again. I trust you have had most enjoyable experience.’

  Wilbur saw that the wooden tables that were usually piled high with weaponry were bare. ‘I need weapons,’ he said. ‘A knife. An axe. Anything!’

  ‘And how would you pay for such a thing?’

  ‘Just take the money from my account like you usually do.’

  Fu Chan gave a sad shake of his head. ‘Such a thing not possible, Mr. Wilbur, sir. For there is no money in your account to be taken.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ Wilbur laughed a brittle laugh. Not so long ago, he’d received a small inheritance from an obscure relative he’d never met. Surely he couldn’t have used it all up just yet?

  The truth of the matter though was that Wilbur hadn’t checked his bank balance of late. Part of him knew he was getting through money far faster than he was earning it, but his addict part didn’t want to know.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, frantically clutching at straws. ‘I can apply online for an overdraft. It shouldn’t take more than a minute to come through.’

  But that hope was quickly squashed by Fu Chan. ‘You already exceed overdraft allowance. Bank will lend no more.’

  ‘Please. I’m begging you!’

  ‘I run business, not charity. Goodbye, Mr. Wilbur, sir.’

  Before Wilbur could respond, he found himself standing in the middle of a road getting soaked by a rain shower which he had no doubt was a deliberate act of malice. Dazed by his sudden reversal of fortune, he looked around for some form of solace.

  It was night as it always was in the world of Slut Slayer. A rectangle of light lay on the pavement ahead, indicating the possibility of at least being able to get in out of the rain. Head down, he ran towards the light and discovered it was falling out of the window of an all-night cafe.

  Once inside, Wilbur was immediately dry again.

  ‘She didn’t put up much of a fight, did she?’ said a voice Wilbur recognised. ‘Bloody disappointing when that happens.’ Mickey Stratton sat in a booth, nursing a cup of coffee. He was dressed in black leather and a U-Boat captain’s cap. ‘You should ask for your money back.’

  ‘Mickey? Is that you?’

  ‘Nah. It’s the Pope.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Waiting for you. You want tea? Coffee? Something stronger?’

  ‘Coffee. White. Two sugars,’ Wilbur and Mickey were the only customers. There was no sign of any staff. Nonetheless, when Wilbur sat opposite Mickey, there was a cup of white coffee waiting for him on the table. A quick sip told him it was exactly how he liked it. ‘Are you still on the run from the police?’

  ‘Yes. And no. It depends on your point of view. But that’s not really the question you should be asking, is it?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘So go on then—ask. Don’t worry about my feelings.’

&
nbsp; ‘OK. Are you real.’

  ‘Again: Yes. And no. If the question is: am I the real Mickey Sutton or a cybernetic simulacrum, I’d have to say I really don’t know. If I can trust my memory, then I most definitely am Mickey Sutton and I’m sitting out there in Realityville jacked into this game having a whale of a time. On the other hand, I might just be a collection of 1s and 0s programmed to believe I’m an actual human being.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘I plugged myself in, the same as you.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean how did you get here—’ Wilbur stabbed the table with his finger to drive home his point. ‘—inside my computer. I have firewalls to stop this sort of thing happening.’

  Mickey snorted his derision. ‘Firewalls? I laugh in the face of firewalls. When you loaded Slut Slayer, you left yourself wide open to me. I just had to stroll in. It was a doddle.’

  ‘And you waited for me in this cafe?’

  ‘Don’t be an arse, Wilbur. Nobody comes to Slutland just to sit on their lonesome drinking piss-poor tea. If you really must know, I’ve been spying on you—watching you at work, as it were.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To see if you could make the grade.’ Mickey took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and broke the seal. ‘People like you and me, Wilbur—we’re the future. We’re the people who make the world go round.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘You ever hear of Project MKUltra?’

  ‘I heard you mention it in the office once. You kept wittering on about the CIA and illegal experiments and stuff, but I wasn’t really listening.’

  Mickey had a lit cigarette in his hand. Wilbur hadn’t seen him remove it from the packet or light it, but that was virtual reality for you. Disjoints happened all the time. ‘A pity. Because if, just for once, you’d extracted your head from between your arse cheeks and paid attention, you’d have learned something worthwhile and be much more prepared for what I’m about to tell you.’ Mickey took a drag on his cigarette and blew a smoke ring. ‘It all began in the 1950s when the CIA decided it would be beneficial for them to control people’s minds. Using their own people as guinea pigs, they discovered and refined ways to modify human behaviour in quite extreme ways. Some of their techniques involved drugs; some relied on torture; others were more subtle but equally as effective. And by effective, I mean ineffective.

  ‘It turned out they couldn’t tamper with a person’s mind without all but destroying it. You want a robot, a robot is what you get—and not much else.’

  Wilbur felt a mixture of boredom and frustration he associated with bad parties and people trying to interest him in things he couldn’t give a toss about. ‘I’m sorry, Mickey. I haven’t got time for this. I need to get to work.’

  ‘Work can wait. I’m just about to tell you everything you need to know to sort your life out.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Bollocks? Seriously?’

  ‘I know you, Mickey. Bullshit is your first language. I’m out of here.’

  ‘Off you go then.’

  Wilbur rolled up his sleeve and tapped his wristwatch three times to signal that he wanted to quit the game.

  Nothing happen.

  Wilbur tried again. And still nothing happened.

  He wasn’t freaked out. At least not yet. But he could feel the first tendrils of panic as he got up and headed for the door. He turned the handle and yanked. The door didn’t budge.

  Behind him, Mickey laughed.

  ‘Shut up, Mickey. Or so help me—’ Wilbur grabbed a chair and threw it at the plate glass window. The chair bounced off the window and left the glass intact.

  ‘You want out of here,’ said Mickey, ‘you have to do what I say. This is my world, Wilbur. In this little froth of bubbling binary notation, I am God.’

  ‘Screw you.’

  ‘Well, that’s an option, but let’s put it to one side for now.’

  ‘Let me out or—’

  ‘Or what? You’ll kill me? Here in virtual reality? What would be the point?’ Mickey got up and tossed aside his cigarette. It vanished in mid-flight. ‘Look. Forget MKUltra for the moment. We’ll come back to that later. You’re in no mood to listen right now. Too tense. Too uptight.’

  ‘I’m uptight because you’re keeping me here against my will.’

  ‘You’re uptight because you need a fix. So why don’t you go slaughter a couple of cuties and then perhaps you’ll be more co-operative?’

  ‘I don’t have any weapons.’

  ‘Here.’ Mickey pointed to the serving hatch. It had been bare a moment ago, but now it sported a machete and a knuckleduster. ‘These do you?’

  Wilbur snatched the weapons and slipped the knuckleduster over his fingers. Mickey slapped him on the back. ‘OK. Let’s go hunting.’

  ___

  They were a mother and daughter, aged mid-40s and early-20s respectively. It hadn’t been easy killing them, but it had been fun.

  His head buzzing with the thrill of it all, Wilbur sat down on the settee and wiped blood from his eyes. ‘Man, those bitches sure put up a fight.’

  ‘Didn’t they just?’ said Mickey, who was standing between the dead bodies. ‘Once or twice, I thought I might have to intervene to save your sorry hide, but you did just fine on your own. In fact, you were magnificent.’

  ‘They’re different though, aren’t they? To the others, I mean.’

  ‘Meet Mrs. Lucinda Barron and her lovely daughter Krystal. If you hadn’t been so keen to kill them, I would have given you their full biog.’

  ‘Well, do so now.’

  ‘Mrs. Barron is recently divorced. She is well-educated and has—or rather had—a good job at a bank. Young Krystal is a virgin. She recently got engaged and was looking forward to a big church wedding.’

  ‘Not sluts then?’

  ‘No more skankers for you, Wilbur. From now on, you only get to murder nice people.’

  ‘I don’t know if I want to murder nice people.’

  ‘Go back to killing whores if you like, but it won’t be the same and you know it.’

  ‘The other women I killed all deserved it.’

  ‘And that’s why killing them has stopped being fun. You sensed the goodness in these people and it had the same effect on you that catnip has on a cat.’

  ‘My god,’ said Wilbur, feeling a blanket of despair falling over him. ‘What have I become?’

  ‘What you were always meant to be.’

  ‘This is MKUltra, isn’t it? That mind control thing you were on about.’

  ‘Very astute, Wilbur, my boy. Once upon a time, MKUltra was dead in the water but then along came the Internet and with it came video games and virtual reality. So now our Lords and Masters have the technology to manipulate the hordes in ways that would give Hitler a hard-on and they’re not shy about using it.

  ‘Games like Slut Slayer and Nazi Hunter contain subliminal messages designed to break down what the advertising industry call sales resistance. It temporarily paralyses the part of our brain that questions authority, and simultaneously weakens our sense of right and wrong.

  ‘Was a time when the only thing you got to shoot at in a video game was a collection of pixels shuffling across a computer screen. Hardly what you’d call the stuff of nightmares. But gradually the games got more realistic and more violent and here we are.

  ‘This game we’re in doesn’t stand alone. There’s a whole barrage of media out there—film, television, music—that’s been hijacked by the powers that be. Day in, day out, we get a steady drip feed of violence and deviant behaviour. What used to be unacceptable is accepted. Perversity is the norm.

  ‘The human race has been reprogrammed. As to why and by whom, that’s for you to work out.’

  Mickey held out a bottle of gin and Wilbur took it almost without thinking. For something that wasn’t real, it sure had a kick—and a much needed one at that. ‘It was no accident I got hold of Slut Slayer, was it? You made
sure I did.’

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ said Mickey.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because somebody at Arthur and Lawrence saw the potential in you.’ Mickey clapped Wilbur on the shoulder and disappeared.

  A moment later, Wilbur removed his VR headset. The first rays of a new day were pouring in through the window, filling the room with light that seemed both unnatural and unpleasant.

  He stood and stretched and yawned. Then he hurried off to the bathroom and threw up.

  ___

  This was the end. The end of everything Wilbur had worked for.

  ‘You lying bitch!’ he yelled. ‘I didn’t touch you!’

  ‘Calm down,’ said Raymond Arthur from behind his desk. ‘Just tell me your side of the story.’

  Wilbur felt like a trapped animal. For only the second time in his life, he was in Raymond Arthur’s office and the outcome this time looked set to be even worse than the last. His job was hanging by a thread. ‘I swear she’s making this up.’

  ‘You’re a liar, Wilbur.’ Isabella Holder’s voice was soft and childlike. There was a tremor in it that indicated fear, or at the very least shock. She was sitting on a leather sofa by the picture window, her face streaked with mascara and tears. ‘You grabbed my breast. You tried to kiss me.’

  ‘Oh, come off it. I didn’t do anything you didn’t want me to. Coming on to me like that! You women are all the same. You tease, tease, tease and then you back out at the last minute.’

  ‘I’ve seen the CCTV footage,’ said Raymond Arthur, speaking in the grave tones of a judge about to deliver sentence. ‘It’s even worse than she says, Edgar. The camera shows you undoing your zip. You were going to rape her.’

  And I bloody well wish I had, thought Wilbur. Attacking Isabella in the lift had been an impulsive act, in no way premeditated. At the time, he’d felt a twinge of guilt, but not now that she’d dropped him right in it.

  ‘The company,’ Raymond Arthur went on, ‘takes this sort of thing very seriously, Edgar—not least because Miss Holder is in a very good position to sue us. I’m left with no choice but to fire you. Also, we’ll be passing the CCTV footage to the police who will no doubt see to it that you end up in prison where you belong.’