by Michael West
“You can’t throw me away like an open bag of trash!” she sniped as she landed at the feet of her people’s chieftain. A single tear ran down the cheek of the old Indian, the 70’s parody lost on so many readers.
Helplessly, the patrons watched as the stranger stormed out of the bar. Despite his rage, his exit was a graceful eerie glide. Then a frigid wind kicked up and slapped their faces, breaking the powerful trance they all had fallen under.
“Um, hey,” the drunk at the juke box muttered. “Little help here. I’m kinda stuck.”
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Dracula, the most powerful evil creature who ever walked the Earth, escaped into the moonlit cornfields to hide his shame. Indiana was not the promise land he was promised. He would not be screaming out, “Hosier Daddy?” As he pushed through the rows of maize, he tumbled into paranormal romance hell. Was there more to it than body glitter, bad acting and brushing your hair with a rake?
His meat-wand jumped. The answer was in front of him the whole time.
That Kristen Stewart was one hot trollop …
I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE
Lucy A. Snyder
Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has appeared in Dark Faith, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Her favorite vampire movie is Near Dark. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com
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Vampires? Of course I know them. You are surprised? Some call me … what is it? “Fang hag.” Ugh. Demeaning. I am crow to their wolves, eagle to their lions. You do not understand? I am succubus; the upyr and I, we do not compete, because we do not want same thing. Sometimes, we feed on each other, yes: cock is cock, and blood is blood. Their seed is … acquired taste. Sour and bitter like rust, and sometimes sticks in throat like stale gummy candy. Not so zingy as live semen. But takes edge off!
I have known the Baron Stierherzov since before he turned to the night. He was warrior lord, much fierce in battle, merciless to the peoples he vanquished in the Old Country. Dracula himself gave him the eternal kiss as reward. Such pedigree you do not find! But before, I knew him as young boy eager for my visits. So full of delicious salty life! I could milk him over and over until his testicles bled, and still he would rise to please me.
So, is only fair I let him take my neck sometimes, now that we are equals. Is only necessary when he cannot hunt, after all; if he is housebound, then likely so am I. I miss olden days of the plagues; you could take anyone you wanted, and unless someone glimpsed you winging away into darkness, who was wiser? But now, every alleyway corpse is put under microscope, put in newspapers. So the Baron adapted, tries to live “green” as they say, and only takes a little here and there. Is frustrating to him, I know. And accidents happen, and then we all must stop feeding for a while.
The sun? No, of course it won’t harm me. But it is not my ally, either. My glamour cannot hold under full light; there is not enough Estée Lauder in the world to full conceal the 600 years in my skin. Oh, is so kind of you to say, darling! But really … for best hunting, the Baron and I need same thing: darkness, and drunkards.
So, was bad thing for us all when Dansky’s was torn down. They bought whole block for stupid mall, and put enormous Starbucks where bar had been, can you believe? Not so much as drop of vodka to be found, so goodbye to all our drunkards. And all those dreadful windows and skylights! So much sun, and so many reflections – I made do, as a lady must, but poor Baron could not stand it, even after sundown.
There was only one reliable hunting ground left to him in the whole city: the Iron Pit Athletic Club. Open all night long, and no windows. He went in one evening, and I did not see him again for whole nine months.
But when I did … oh, what a sight he was.
It was noon; the sun burned high in sky. Miserable cloudless day. But I sat there in the coffee house with my black tea, watching the people come and go. I had just spotted young man, shy, ordering a mocha latte, and I could smell the miasma of stifled lust on him. I had just stood up to go work my wiles on him when it happened.
“I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE!”
It was an inhuman shout, loud as a war cannon. We all turned toward the noise, turned to stare out at the street, and I saw an absolute monster out there. A man-shaped thing, hulking, massive, muscle piled upon muscle, flesh wormed with thick veins. It strode down the street, naked, skin aflame in the relentless sunlight.
“I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE!” the thing bellowed again. The purple flames devouring its flesh were rising higher and higher, skin blackening, curling like paper and ashing away, revealing gray-red muscle and yellow tendons beneath.
“I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE!”
I recognized the voice … it was the Baron! In an instant, I realized that for those nine months he’d been hiding behind concrete walls, he’d been lifting weights and drinking blood from the thick, brutish necks of hundreds of sweaty steroid junkies. His diet had made him huge, and the unnatural chemicals had inflamed his frustrations with the modern world until it drove him mad as a Spanish arena bull.
His eyeballs were burning in his skull like furnace coals as he strode up to the Starbucks; the glass in the door shattered from the heat of his burning flesh. The smoke pouring off him smelled like the corpse pyres of the old battlefields.
“I FUCK YOUR SUNSHINE!” he roared at all the suburbanites shrieking and scrambling to get away from him.
He stood there amid the chaos, burning in the sunlight streaming down from those hateful skylights, proud as he had ever been as the victor of countless duels, and my cold heart broke at the dire beauty of him.
He took another deep breath to bellow his war cry, and I heard a loud pop!
And he exploded, shattering all the windows, piercing the fleeing humans with the flaming shrapnel of his bones. Cutting glass rained down on me, slicing my flesh to ribbons, but I did not care — I could see his heart there in the wreckage of his blown-apart body. It glowed and smoked, but still it pulsed with power.
So I snatched it up and hid it beneath my blood-soaked blouse. I carried it to the safety of my dark apartment, and kept it beating in a jar of my own blood. Later, when I realized what I must do, I broke into the morgue at night and pulled the bits of his bones from the bodies of the dead. It was not much, but it was a start.
What? You do not understand? Come down the hall with me to the guest bath … come see.
There. Do you see how the blood moves in the middle of the tub? That’s the throbbing of his heart. Already you can see his skull growing back together, and the tendons of his ribs. I am sure the organs and muscles should be next, and then his skin.
Oh, darling … no. Don’t struggle. It is already done, see? You’ll just waste your own blood. Let it flow. The Baron needs fresh every day, now. Soon he shall be awake, and he and I will hide no more. We shall treat this city and its people the way we should have treated them all along. We will be crow and wolf, eagle and lion.
We will fuck everybody’s sunshine.
ALWAYS DARKEST BEFORE THE DAWN
“Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted;
a world in which murder was easier than hope.”
–Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
A SOLDIER’S STORY
Maurice Broaddus
Maurice Broaddus has written hundreds of short stories, essays, novellas, and articles. His dark fiction has been published in numerous magazines, anthologies, and web sites, including Cemetery Dance, Apex Magazine, Black Static, and Weird Tales Magazine. He is the co-editor of the Dark Faith anthology series (Apex Books) and the author of the urban fantasy trilogy, Knights of Breton Court (Angry Robot Books). He has been a teaching artist for over fiv
e years, teaching creative writing to elementary, middle, and high school students, as well as adults. Visit his site at www.MauriceBroaddus.com.
His favorite vampire tales are The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, and Summer of Night by Dan Simmons.
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July 23, 1895 – Parsons, Indiana
“There are things … ” he started to say, but how do you begin such a horrific tale to one so young. “Once upon a time, there was a town under the spell of … ” Of what? Unsettling madness?
He casually stroked her downy, blonde hair, as if appreciating her beauty for the first time. Her small wood hewn bed framed her like an idyllic picture, just as he always imagined it would. Though it was the dream from a different life, he mentally pictured this very scene a hundred times. It inspired him to labor on when he hand-crafted each piece. He knew the nine months would pass too quickly when he started working the wood, and he wanted it to be perfect. Whittling away long, devoted hours on the headboard alone, he lamented that his skill didn’t match his passion. Translating what he imagined into what he carved: a broad willow tree in a field of blooming flowers. Where better for his child to lay her slumbering head? She slept, innocent against the backdrop of violence, mayhem, and blood. It always came back to blood, so much of it on his own, still-trembling hands. A miasma of despair, grief, and guilt, he only distantly recognized the hollow sounding voice as his own. He pressed on with the telling of the tale anyway.
“I’ve committed some awful things. Deeds of which I am not proud. Things a child ought not to hear. But things which I must tell you anyway.
“It hurts to remember, like a dull headache you get when someone wakes you too quickly from a nightmare. The story begins with Holten Owensby. That opportunistic devil.”
She grimaced in her sleep, furtive sounds escaping as she jostled her blanket. Only then did he realize how sharp his words had become. No matter how many generations down the line she may be, she was still kin.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as he brushed her head with his hand, “but I have known the truth about that demon in men’s flesh for far too long and kept silent. He couldn’t wait for his father, a good man, mind you, to die before he started spending his money. A few financial setbacks had put him in a state most foul. He was one of the investors in the railroad endeavor through Parsons that slowly proved itself to be a Pyrrhic race. You knew, for those who wanted to know or cared to look, from the leer in his eyes that he had killed in his time. And that kill was still on his mind. Deep-set grey eyes, like murky reflecting pools hidden by shadow. His spare silver hair combed back to vainly disguise his bald top. His face swirled of shadows and distrust, helped in no part by his overgrown mustache that gave him the appearance of a character from a dime story western.
“Parsons was a sleepy little hollow, with aspirations of being a city. The last shot from the Civil War still echoed in the air as people moved there. It was the perfect place for a man with a history he wished to forget to lose himself in. Free Negroes and escaped slaves settled the area just outside of the town. A few log cabins and meager shanties, more of an encampment than a town, but it was theirs. As Parsons boomed, so did the Scott Settlement. That was all they wanted. We should’ve seen that. And they knew their place. Most of the time they contented themselves doing the jobs that no white man wanted to do. It was not as if they did not know that the Sheriff and his boys could come in and settle any disputes any way they saw fit. Such was the relationship between Parsons and the Scott Settlement, like a town and her shadow. With the arrival of the trains, Parsons expected its growth spurt to continue.
“But there were only so many train jobs.”
She slept, undisturbed in the glow of pale moonlight. Angelic. An ideal worth protecting.
“I was not worried about myself. I kept to myself, never wanting to draw too much attention. You live a life as long as I have, you learn a few things. I was tired of wars, whether they were revolutionary or civil. It was on such a field of battle where I was changed. It was easy to hide and feed among such death. Soldiering was all I knew. No, that wasn’t true. Mine was the business of death and I was tiring of it. I tried to change and I returned home. Folks didn’t care about my peculiarities of habit and hours kept because I was the best furniture maker in these parts, ’cept’n maybe them folks in Amish country. Plenty of call for me, too, with all the newfound money people were making, not to mention the old monied families desiring to expand their interests. My neighbors, my friends, however, they worried for their jobs, their futures, and how they would take care of their families. People only grumbled, as they were wont to do, when jostled on the street, feelin’ too pressed in by the Scott Settlement. But that fear always simmered underneath. That ‘it could all be taken away’ fear; and just cause times were good and no one was goin’ hungry don’t mean that fear had gone. Fear that Holten preyed on.
“It was an election year and, of course, there had been some lively electioneering going on in these parts during Cleveland’s campaign. Folks knew that all of those Republican voting Negroes were going to turn out in hordes come election day. That didn’t sit well with many folks, especially those who already believed that with all the Negroes migrating here, they were going to vote away jobs from the local people. People thought they were going to lose their jobs. They thought … what was said about their women and children … terrible things. It was no excuse, I just wanted you to understand. You would think they had enough to fear with the things that moved in the night. The creatures they whispered about around the hearth fires. But fear blinds men to their reality. Fear snakes through them, takes hold of their heart and drives them to do dark things in its name. That was the nature of humanity.
“Night dusted down to the song of dusk. A hot, sweaty dusk. We crammed into the courthouse, made even more miserably hot because so many concerned citizens showed up. We had people at the door that only allowed Parsons locals in. Labor leaders fine-tuned the organ of resentment for Holten to soon come play. Rumors tore through the town presenting problems only politicians promised to fix. Rumors that more Negroes were due to be imported in from others states, to steal men’s jobs. The mood became more and more hostile as the night wore on.
“Then that devil Holten stood up.
“‘Parsons has changed,’ he said, ‘and is no longer safe for good folk. Right now, in our jail, sits an animal guilty of murder.’
“‘Murder?’ ‘Who?’ The whispers scattered like crickets in the night.
“Holten paused, letting the weight of his words carry, his fingers deftly dancing along the organ. He slowly revealed how earlier that day, Samuel Demory, an ax buried in his neck, was found dead. The blade did not match the savagery of the wound, the veins almost mutilated in the frenzy but that didn’t matter. The ax belonged to his long time workman, Ezekiel Walker. The same man guilty of … deeds most vile against Samuel’s daughter, Rebecca. She still rested in shock, being treated by her mother at the Demory place. Rebecca Demory. She had spark that girl did. Her aristocratic manner she used to try and put on never once hid the gentle soul that did not hesitate to reach out to people. She stirred things within any who saw her. Made it difficult for them to keep their hungers at bay, no matter how God-fearing or disciplined they were.
“‘Our women, our daughters, are not safe. How long will the good folks of Parsons suffer this?’ Holten asked. ‘Our women desire protection and this is the only way we’ll get it.’”
The man paused, stroking the curls of the sleeping girl. The rise and fall of her chest came in regular, even breaths. The way the moonlight fell on her face, swathing her like a shroud, only made her seem more winsome. More vital.
“If it hadn’t have been this, it would have been something else. I know it in my soul. When you have a room full of blasting powder, the kind of spark doesn’t matter. By early evening, the paper ran an editorial: ‘Nab Negro for Attacking Girl.’ The fact that he was already ‘
nabbed’ and in jail eluded everyone. The article demanded—without actually calling for—the lynching of the Negro that very night. It ran beside a cartoon of Negroes bribed with beer, chicken, and watermelons carted in to be new voters to the area and steal jobs.
“Because the flames apparently needed a little more fuel.
“Holten deputized everyone. It didn’t seem to matter that he couldn’t deputize his big toe much less anyone else. ‘Niggers were guilty of crimes against whites,’ he shouted to any doubters, ‘that was all the authority I need.’ The women, in their Sunday dresses — all calico and sunbonnets — paraded alongside us as if on their way to a show. A town full of good people, decent people, now overwhelmed by the sudden conviction of the rightness of their actions.
“My convictions I thought were unshakeable. I lived by a simple code which kept me alive for so long. To hear people murmur, there was no doubt that come the next morning, they would be able to stand by what they did to that ‘rabid beast,’ Ezekiel. No one felt any sorrow over righting that wrong. But their shame was soon coming.
“Apparently word had escaped to the Scott Settlement about the storming of the jail and the justice to be carried out on old Ezekiel Walker. The people of Parsons didn’t care. They wanted the Scott folk to know that any one of them could be next if they stepped out of line or forget their place. Even as the good people of Parsons were dispersing after our … bonfire … word got back to us that the Negroes were arming themselves. For a war. Can’t say that I much blame ’em really, folks just defending themselves and their families. But niggers with guns? No one could have foreseen that. The very notion of that was disconcerting. A stand had to be taken. There had to be respect for the rule of law.
“The night color gave courage to many men who had been different during day hours. Men swarmed about, the hour too late for respectable women and children. It was a motley collection of overalls, thick tan shoes, and felt hats. They weren’t thinking any more, not in the way men usually think. It was as if they were seized by a feeling, almost a presence, bigger than themselves, bigger than Holten Owensby, maybe bigger than Parsons. Like worker bees rushing about serving an unseen queen bee. I don’t know what their intentions were, whether we wanted to secure our town or rush into the Scott Settlement with the common goal of beating every Negro in the area. I really think we believed it was more of the former.