Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 3

by Cheryl Mullenax

  At some point, of course, the money was going to run out.

  At some point, Rose would have to deal with the back room. She’d need to break down the door. She’d need to think of a way to dispose of the piled bones.

  Mostly, though, Rose did her best not to think too far beyond the present moment. This was what Jack advised her to do. He assured her it was how Buddhists lived—and quite happily, too. Rose liked to believe she was getting pretty good at it.

  After the dog park, she’d fix dinner, do the dishes, retire with Jack and Millie to the living room for the nightly dose of TV. Then she’d take Millie and Zeus out for their midnight walk, and brush her teeth, and wash her face, and pull on her pajamas, and climb into bed. As easily as that another day was done.

  And another.

  And another

  Sitting on a bench at the dog run one evening, Rose thought of what Jack had said that first morning: It can be a win-win situation, if you only embrace it with the right attitude. She’d finished with the ball throwing for the evening; Jack was lying at her feet, panting from his exercise. Millie was perched on the bench beside her, watching the other dogs play. This was in the middle of May, and the air smelled heavy with pollen. Rose shut her eyes, breathed deep: win-win.

  * * *

  It was only a day or two later, a little after midnight, that Jack said: “Just a heads-up? Your rent’s due tomorrow.”

  Rose was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. She leaned, spit the toothpaste into the sink, twisted off the water, then turned to look at Jack. He was sitting in the bathroom doorway. “I thought it was withdrawn from the bank account,” she said.

  “Not the apartment’s rent. Your rent. As a subletter.”

  “I have to pay rent?”

  “Nothing in life comes for free, Girl.”

  Rose considered that for a moment, then shook the water from her toothbrush, set it in the glass beside the faucet. “How much?”

  “It’s not about money.”

  “It’s not?”

  Jack shook his head. “It’s about keeping us fed—Millie and Zeus and me.”

  Rose turned the water back on, waited for it to get warm enough for her to wash her face. “You want me to buy some dog food?”

  “We want you to bring someone home with you.”

  Rose was bending toward the sink, cupping water in her hands, but she stopped at this, pivoted to look at Jack again. She knew what he meant, but she didn’t want to know, and this desire was strong enough so that, for a moment at least, it almost felt as if she actually didn’t know. “I don’t understand.”

  Jack gave her his exactly-like-a-smile thing, with his tail and head and ears. “Yes, you do,” he said.

  Then he stood and walked off down the hall. She heard the dog door creak as he nudged it open and vanished into the rear room for the night.

  * * *

  In the morning, sitting on the couch, drinking the day’s first, pre-shower, pre-walk cup of coffee, she told Jack she wasn’t going to do it—not now, not ever.

  “You’re acting as if you have a choice here,” Jack said. “This situation would unfold so much more smoothly, if you accepted that you don’t.”

  “It’s not that I won’t do it,” Rose said, hating the hesitancy in her voice, how it made her sound as if she were attempting to negotiate, rather than issuing an ultimatum, which was her intention. “It’s that I can’t.”

  “You’ve already done it once.”

  “That was self-defense. That was panic. That was—”

  “Exactly. Think how much easier it will be now. When you know what you’re doing.”

  “I’ll cook you whatever you want. Chicken. Steak. Fish. Do you like—”

  “Remember when you asked how we can talk? And I said it was the apartment? That was only half the answer. It’s also what we eat. What we’ve been fed.”

  “So stop fucking talking! Eat normal food and become a normal dog. Would that be such a terrible thing? What’s so great about speaking, anyway?”

  “You bring someone home. You have sex with this person. And then you kill them. That’s your rent.”

  “I have sex with them?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Why do I need to have sex with them?”

  “It tenderizes the meat.”

  “You’re kidding, right? This is some sort of joke?”

  “There’s a ticking clock here, Girl. Just so you’re warned.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You won’t like Zeus when he’s hungry.”

  Rose had finished her coffee by now. She stood up, started for the kitchen. “Fuck Zeus,” she said, as she left the room. “Fuck Millie. And fuck you. I’m not going to do it.”

  She meant this, too. Or at least she thought she did. Because Jack was right: Rose still believed she had a choice in the matter. She brought home two packages of chicken breasts that afternoon, three cans of cream of chicken soup, a bag of potatoes, a bundle of carrots, an onion, and some bouillon cubes, and she spent the evening making her mother’s chicken stew. She ladled out a dish of it and set it down beside the dog’s water bowl.

  Let them smell it, she thought. Let them taste it.

  But the dogs ignored her offering. By the following afternoon, the stew was starting to have an odd, jelly-like appearance, so she threw it out, and washed the dish, and ladled in a fresh serving, and placed this beside their water.

  She’d cooked enough to get through four days of this ritual, and when the stew ran out, she bought two sirloin steaks. She grilled one and set it on a plate beside their water, and when the dogs ignored this, too, she took the second steak out of the fridge and set it down uncooked, and on the seventh day, when they’d ignored this, too, she ordered Szechuan beef from a Chinese restaurant, and tried that. She could sense they were hungry—they were growing short-tempered and listless. Jack had stopped chasing the ball when they went to the dog park; one of the other owners even asked Rose if there was something wrong with him. She was certain she just had to persist, that eventually they’d relent. They’d begin to eat, and once they began, it would be difficult for them to stop. Rose didn’t know how long it would take for them to lose their ability to talk, but once they did, she could force open the door to the rear room and clean out the bones. And once she’d cleaned out the bones, she could leave the apartment—she could go back to her old life. She’d have to figure out what to do about the dogs, of course, but this shouldn’t be that difficult. She could take Zeus and Millie to the pound, and maybe keep Jack for herself, bring him with her back to—

  She was at the kitchen sink, washing her dinner plates, when she heard a noise behind her, and she turned to find Zeus entering the kitchen. He shuffled toward the bowl of Szechuan beef, and Rose felt her heart rate jump—the throb of blood in her veins, urgent and hopeful. She watched Zeus sniff the bowl. He turned and looked at her.

  “Go on,” she said. “Try it.”

  Zeus gave the bowl a sharp smack with his paw, sending it skittering to the far side of the kitchen, the Szechuan beef spilling over the linoleum.

  “Bad dog …!” Rose shouted. “Bad dog …!”

  Zeus crouched, began to empty his bladder, staring at Rose the entire time. Then he turned and walked slowly out of the kitchen, an immense puddle of urine spreading across the floor behind him, mixing with the spilled food. Jack was watching from the doorway. “You’re a week late now, Girl,” he said. “Which means you’ll have to pay a penalty.”

  Rose ignored him. She grabbed a roll of paper towels, began to sop up the mess. Did Jack really think that Zeus peeing in the kitchen was such a terrible thing? That it would pressure her into bringing a stranger home for them to eat? A stranger she’d need to fuck first, to “tenderize” his “meat?” Because if that was what he really thought … well, he had another thing coming.

  * * *

  But that wasn’t what Jack thought—not at all, as it turned out.

  * * *
/>   It happened later that night. Much later.

  Rose was asleep. She was lying on her stomach. The room was dark, and someone was on top of her, holding her down. Someone else was roughly yanking at her underwear. Rose was waking up—not slowly, but all at once—and the person on top of her wasn’t a person, it was Zeus, and the person yanking at her underwear wasn’t a person, it was Millie, and Jack was there, too, standing beside the bed, watching, and she heard a voice, but it wasn’t Jack’s and it wasn’t Millie’s, and she knew it had to be Zeus’s, a deep, angry voice, that said: “You bitch. You fucking bitch.”

  Millie got Rose’s underwear down, and Zeus was thrusting at her—growling and thrusting—no, that wasn’t it, that wasn’t it at all, he wasn’t thrusting at her … he was thrusting into her.

  Rose screamed.

  “You bitch,” Zeus said. “You fucking bitch.”

  He kept saying these words, over and over, in rhythm with his thrusts. This went on for a full minute, maybe two, an excruciatingly long stretch of time, and finally Rose felt the dog come inside her. Then he leaned down, growling again, and bit her left shoulder. He clamped into her with his teeth and he twisted and tugged, and twisted and tugged, and then he tore a hunk of flesh from her body.

  Rose was still screaming.

  Her right arm was trapped under her torso, but she was swinging with the left one, trying to land a blow, flailing, open-handed, and then something grabbed at her, arresting the arm’s motion. There was a snapping sound, like a branch breaking. This last part happened so quickly that it was finished before Rose could even register the full horror: Jack had caught her hand in his mouth … Jack had bitten off her pinkie. The pain took a long moment to arrive. Rose was fumbling for the lamp, turning it on, blood running down her back from the wound on her shoulder, blood spigotting from her hand, Zeus’s semen spilling out between her legs.

  Oh my god oh my god oh my god …

  Jack and Zeus had already vanished from the room. Only Millie remained, scurrying about on the floor beside the bed, frantically licking at the spilt blood.

  * * *

  Rose sat for three hours in the Mount Sinai Emergency Room (a towel wrapped around her hand, another towel clamped to her shoulder) before a nurse finally called her name. She was led into an examination room, told to take off her clothes and put on one of those hospital robes that tie in the back, and then she waited for another forty-five minutes before a tired-looking Indian woman entered. This woman introduced herself as Dr. Cheema. She started to set out a collection of medical supplies on a metal tray, and she asked Rose what had happened.

  “I was attacked by a dog. Three, actually.”

  Dr. Cheema pursed her lips and clucked her tongue, but didn’t seem especially interested or impressed. “Do you know if they’ve been vaccinated for rabies?”

  “I think so.”

  “Can you find out for certain?”

  “I can ask them.”

  “The owners?”

  Rose thought to herself: No, the dogs. But she didn’t say these words; she just nodded.

  Dr. Cheema picked up a syringe, inserted it into a small ampule, pulled back on the plunger. “Okay, then. Shall we start with your hand?”

  If the doctor had probed even a little further, Rose believed she would’ve told her everything. She would’ve told her about the apartment, and Daniel—she would’ve even tried to explain the talking-dogs part of the story. She didn’t care; she was past caring. But Dr. Cheema didn’t probe. She focused on Rose’s wounds, flushing them clean, stitching them up. The shadows under the doctor’s eyes were so dark they looked like tattoos, and Rose could sense her fighting a repetitive impulse to yawn—the involuntary inhalation, the stiffening of her body, the clenching of her jaw. It was six in the morning, and a man was shouting somewhere down the hall, telling someone to fuck off, to get their fucking hands off him, shouting this—screaming, really—and then suddenly falling silent. Rose didn’t want to picture what was happening—not to the man, and not to herself, either. Dr. Cheema was standing behind her, willing her body not to yawn, and she’d injected something into Rose’s shoulder so that Rose no longer felt any pain, just a tugging sensation each time the doctor stapled another suture across the wound. Rose was given a bottle of antibiotics, a bottle of painkillers, and a slip of paper with a surgeon’s name on it: Dr. Thomas Hawthorne. She was supposed to call this man later that day and make an appointment so that Dr. Hawthorne could address the damage to Rose’s hand, which looked like a paw now—a polar bear’s paw—encased in its white wrapping.

  They sent her home.

  Rose didn’t have enough money with her for another cab, so she dry-swallowed two of the painkillers and started walking west, into Central Park. The sun had risen, and the joggers were out. Rose tried to imagine what life must be like for these people, up early before work, pulling on their brightly colored outfits, tying the laces on their shoes, heading out into the dawn, the sweat rising on their skin, the shower afterward, the healthy breakfast, and then onward into the well-oiled machinery of their days. Even at the best of times, Rose could feel an aversion to people like this. But now, with Zeus’s semen still leaking out of her, dampening her underwear, with the pain in her hand and shoulder both there and not there (the pills were keeping it at bay, but Rose could feel how weak they were, how quickly they’d fade from her system, and how restive the pain was, waiting for its moment), with her sense of fatigue like a companion, limping along at her side, leaning more and more heavily upon her with every step, what she felt for these strangers running past was something closer to hatred. She would never be like them. She would never even know people like them. She thought of the young men who showed up at shopping malls with loaded rifles, and she believed she understood why.

  Her hand was beginning to throb. At some point very soon it was going to become unbearable. And yet Rose would have to find a way to bear it, because that was what it meant to be alive. She wasn’t going to return to the apartment. Her body decided this before her mind: she realized she was walking south through the park, rather than west. Rose didn’t have money for a train ticket, but this didn’t matter. She could get on the train and then, when the conductor came to punch her ticket, she could pretend to have lost her wallet. She knew that if she looked distressed enough—and what could be easier today?—the conductor would end up comforting instead of scolding her. She’d have to get off the train in Newark, but then she could just catch the next one coming through, and repeat the pantomime. And so on, station by station, all the way home. It would take a lot longer to reach her destination, but she’d get there in the end. She’d done this once before, a year ago, after she’d been pickpocketed, dancing at Cielo. When she got to the Dunellen stop, she could call her mother collect from the station’s payphone, and beg her to come and pick her up. If she cried—and what could be easier today?—she was certain she could get her mother to do it.

  And then?

  She supposed it would all play out exactly as Jack had originally threatened. The dogs would bark and whimper and howl until a neighbor took notice. The neighbor would call the landlord. The landlord would contact the police. The police would break down the door—not just the door to the apartment, but also the door to the rear room. They’d find the bones there, and the apartment would become a crime scene. Neighbors would describe Rose to the police; the techs would find her fingerprints, her DNA. Rose didn’t know how long all of this would take, but she knew it wouldn’t be long enough to count as a respite. Soon enough, she’d be in a jail cell. But she didn’t care; she’d been past caring in the Emergency Room, and now she was even past the point of not caring, past the point of thinking at all—she was just walking, with her fatigue shuffling along beside her, and her hand throbbing in rhythm with her heart, and her underwear like a damp hand fondling her groin.

  She was near the Reservoir when the first dog lunged at her. It was a little terrier mix, twenty pounds of clenche
d muscle on the taut end of a leash, growling and barking and snapping its jaws as Rose moved by, the owner staring in surprise, saying: “JoJo! Stop it! What’s gotten into you?”

  And then, just a little further down the path, a black Lab, carrying a tennis ball in its mouth, loping along with a happy-go-lucky air; the dog dropped the ball, and leapt toward Rose as she drew near, growling and slathering and pawing at the dirt, and its owner had the same startled reaction as the terrier’s, straining to hold the Lab back, saying: “Ichabod! What the fuck …?”

  A third dog, then a fourth, then three chihuahuas on the same leash, all of them straining toward Rose in a state of fury, teeth bared, and Rose realized in a muddy sort of way what must be happening. If she was right—and she was certain she was—then the park was the wrong place for her to be, the wrong place entirely. After all Rose had been through, she wouldn’t have thought she had the energy to run, but she was scared, so adrenaline was in the fuel mix, and run she did: east now, toward the Metropolitan Museum, toward Fifth Avenue. If she could just get to the exit, if she could just—

  She heard a man shout: “Bo …!”

  And then she heard the barking—deeper than the Labrador’s barking, and the terrier’s, and the chihuahuas’—deep enough to force Rose to glance back over her shoulder. Bo was a pit bull. He was fifteen yards away, sprinting toward her, his leash bouncing along behind him in the dirt. He’d broken free of his owner’s grip.

  “Bo …!”

  The owner was running, too, but the owner was overweight and out of shape, and still forty yards away.

  “Bo …!”

  Bo hit Rose in the chest with both front paws, knocking her onto her back. She was trying to push him away, but he was far too strong.