by Apex Authors
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Apex Publications, LLC
www.apexdigest.com
Copyright ©2007 by Apex Authors
First published in 2007, 2007
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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What Say You
Editorial by Jason B Sizemore
Welcome to our tenth issue! People tell me that this issue is something of a milestone. But for me, it was business as usual, collecting some of the best short fiction the genre has to offer.
Yet, I can't help but take a moment to reflect on the past two and a half years. The ups—Stoker nomination, publishing some of my favorite writing icons, love and adoration of peers (okay ... still working on that one). The downs—evil computer problems, subscription resellers, the USPS. It's been a crazy, adrenaline filled ride the whole way, and I'm hooked on it.
This issue highlights six fiction writers who are carrying the torch onward for horror and science fiction. So let's kick up our heels and allow them to guide us through another fine release of Apex Digest.
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Jason Sizemore: Editor in Chief
Gill Ainsworth: Senior Editor
Deb Taber: Editor/Art Director
Alethea Kontis: Contributing Editor
Mari Adkins: Submissions Editor
Jodi Lee: Submissions Editor
Justin Stewart: Content Designer
E.D. Trimm: Copy Editor
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Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest is a publication of Apex Publications, LLC and is distributed four times a year from Lexington, Kentucky.
Copyright © 2007 all rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reprinted in whole or in part without written permission.
ISSN: 1553-7269
Apex Science Fiction & Horror Digest PO Box 2223, Lexington, KY 40588-2223
Email: [email protected] Website: www.apexdigest.com
Table of Contents:
Bad Sushi—Cherie Priest
Interview with Cherie Priest
Daydreams—Lavie Tidhar
Memories of the Knacker's Yard—Ian Creasey
Interview with William F. Nolan
Pigs and Feaches—Patrice E. Sarath
Cain Xp11 (Part 2): The Henry Lee Lucas Memorial Highway—Geoffrey Girard
Route 666: Road Trip to World Horror 2007—Alethea Kontis
Monument—Nancy Fulda
CONTENTS
Bad Sushi by Cherie Priest
Interview with Cherie Priest
Daydreams by Lavie Tidhar
Memories of the Knacker's Yard by Ian Creasey
Interview with William F. Nolan
PIGS AND FEACHES by Patrice E. Sarath
Cain Xp11 (Part 2): The HenRy Lee Lucas Memorial Highway by Geoffrey Girard
Route 666: Road Trip to World Horror 2007 by Alethea Kontis
Monument by Nancy Fulda
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Bad Sushi by Cherie Priest
A master of southern gothic horror, Cherie Priest has seen her career skyrocket in the past few years. Her first book (Tor) titled Four and Twenty Blackbirds has been a critical and commercial success. The second book of her “Eden Moore” trilogy, Wings to the Kingdom, was just released—with the third slated for 2007. She also has a limited edition novella available from Subterranean Press titled Dreadful Skin and she appears in the Apex featured writer anthology Aegri Somnia. A popular blogger, you can find her daily musings at cmpriest.livejournal.com.
Baku's hand shook.
In it, he held a pinch of wasabi, preparing to leave it as a peaked green dollop beside a damp pile of flesh-colored ginger. But something stopped him from finishing the dish. He hesitated, even though his fellow chef slapped the kitchen bell once, twice, a third time—and his own orders were backing up.
The waitress flashed Baku a frown.
Some small fact was wiggling around in his expansive memory. Some ancient recollection was fighting its way forward. In the back of his sinuses, he felt a tickle of sulfur. The kitchen in Sonada's smelled like soy sauce, and sizzling oil, and frying rice; but Baku also detected rotten eggs.
He smeared the glob of gritty paste onto the rectangular plate before him, and he pushed the neatly-sliced sushi rolls up into the pick-up window. The hot yellow smell grew stronger in his nose, but he could work through it. All it took was a little concentration.
He reached for his knives. The next slip in the queue called for a California roll, a tuna roll, and a salmon roll. Seaweed. Rice. Fish meat, in slick, soft slabs. He wrapped it all expertly, without thinking. He sliced the rolls without crushing them and slid them onto the plate.
That's why Sonada's kept Baku, despite his age. He told them he was seventy, but that was a lie by eight years—an untruth offered because his employers were afraid he was too old to work. But American Social Security wasn't enough, and the work at the restaurant wasn't so hard. The hours were not so long. The other men who cut the fish were young, but they treated him with respect. He was from their parents’ homeland, after all.
The other workers were all born Americans. They didn't have to take the test or say the pledge, one hand over their hearts.
Baku didn't hold it against them, and the others didn't hold his original nationality against him. They might have, if they'd known the uniform he'd once worn. They might have looked at him differently, these young citizens, if they'd known how frantically he'd fired, and how he'd aimed for all the bright blue eyes.
There it was again. The sulfur. Baku had tripped over a G.I.'s body as he staggered towards the beach at Cape Esperance, but he hadn't thought much of it. He'd been preoccupied at the time—thinking only of meeting the secret transport that would take him the hell out of Guadalcanal. The Emperor had declared the island a lost cause, and an evacuation had been arranged.
It had happened under cover of night. The transport had been a crushing rush of thirteen thousand brown-eyed men clamoring for the military ferry. The night had reeked of gunpowder, and body odor, and sulfur, and blood.
Baku thought again of the last dead American he'd seen on Guadalcanal, the man's immobile body just beginning to stink in the sunset. If someone had told him, back in 1942, that in sixty years he'd be serving the dead American's grandchildren sushi rolls ... Baku would have never believed it.
He looked at the next slip of lined white and green paper.
Shrimp rolls. More tuna.
Concentrate.
He breathed in the clean, sparse scent of the seafood—so faint it was almost undetectable. If it smelled like more than salt and the ocean, then it was going rotten. There were guidelines, of course, about how cold it must be kept and how it must be stored—but the old chef didn't need to watch any thermometers or check any dates. He knew when the meat was good. He knew what it would taste like, lying on top of the rice, and dipped lightly in a small puddle of soy sauce.
One order after another, he prepared them. His knives flashed, and his fingers pulled the sticky rice into bundles. His indefatigable wrists jerked and lurched from counter to bowl to chopping block to plate.
Eventually, with enough repetition and enough concentration, the remembered eggy nastiness left his head.
When his shift was over, he removed his apron and washed his knives. This was a small ritual that he i
ndulged in each night. It was a closing habit, like a bedtime story he might tell himself after the supper rush.
He dried the knives each in turn, slipping them into a cloth pouch that he rolled up and carried home. The knives belonged to him, and they were a condition of his employment. They were good knives, made of German steel by a company that had folded ages before. And Baku would work with no others.
At home that night, he lay in bed and tried to remember what had brought on the flashback. Usually there was some concrete reason—an old military uniform, a glimpse of ribbon that looked like a war medal, or a Memorial Day parade.
What had brought back the island?
At home in bed, it was safe to speculate. At home, in the small apartment with the threadbare curtains and the clean kitchen, it was all right to let his mind wander.
* * * *
Sixty years ago there was a war and he was a young man. He was in the Emperor's army and he went to the South Pacific, and there was an island. The Americans dug in there and forced the Japanese troops to retreat.
Under cover of darkness they fled. They sneaked away at night, from the point at Cape Esperance. Personnel boats had been waiting. “There were thirteen-thousand of us,” he said to himself in his native tongue. “And we evacuated in the middle of the night, while the Americans slept."
The water had been black and it had been calm, as calm as the ocean ever was. Hushed, hushed, and hushed, the soldiers slogged into the water to meet the transports. In haste and in extreme caution, they had boarded the boats in packs and rows. They had huddled down on the slat seats and listened to the furtive cacophony of oars and small propellers.
He seemed to recall a panic—not his own. Another man, someone badly hurt, in mind and body. The man had stood up in the boat and tried to call out. His nearest neighbor tackled him, pulled him back down into his seat, but the ruckus unsettled the small craft.
Baku was sitting on the outside rail, one of the last men crammed aboard.
When the boat lunged, he lost his balance. Over the side he toppled, and into the water. It was like falling into ink, with a riptide. Fear was halted by the fierce wetness, and his instincts were all but exhausted by days of battle. He thought to float, though. He tried to right himself, and to roll out of the fetal suspension.
And something had stopped him—hard.
Even after sixty years, the memory of it shocked him—the way the thing had grabbed him by the ankle. The thing that seized him felt like a living cable made of steel. It coiled itself around his leg, one loop, two loops, working its way to a tighter grip with the skill of a python and the strength of something much, much larger.
Inside Baku's vest he carried a bayonet blade made of carbon steel. It was sharp enough to cut paper without tearing it. It was strong enough to hold his weight.
His first thought and first fear was that this was a strange new weapon devised by the Americans; but his second thought and subsequent fear was that this was no weapon at all, but a creature.
There was sentience and insistence in the way the thing squeezed and tugged. He curled his body up to pull his hand and his knife closer to the clutching, grasping thing.
And because he was running out of air, he arched his elbow up and tightened his leather-tough wrists. They'd been taut and dense with muscle even then, when he was young. He'd grown up beside the ocean, cutting the fish every day, all day, until the Emperor had called for his service and he'd taken up a gun instead.
So it was with strength and certainty that he brought the knife down into the thing that held his leg.
It convulsed. It twitched, and Baku stabbed again. The water went warmer around his ankle, and the terrible grip slackened. Again. A second time, and a third. In desperation, he began to saw, unafraid that he would hit his own flesh, and unaware of the jagged injury when he did.
By then the air was so low and he was so frightened, he might have cut off his whole leg in pursuit of escape ... but it proved unnecessary. After several heroic hacks Baku all but severed the living lasso; and at that moment, one of his fellow soldiers got a handful of the back of his shirt.
Human hands pulled him up, and out, and over—back into the boat. A faint and final tug at his leg went nearly unnoticed as the last of the thing stretched, split, and tore.
On the floor of the boat Baku gasped and floundered like a freshly caught fish. The other soldiers covered him with their hands, hushing him. Always hushing. The Americans might hear.
He shook and shook, and shook some more—taking comfort in the circle of faces that covered him from above and shut out the star-spangled sky. At last he breathed and the breath was not hard-won.
But he did not feel safe.
Around his leg the leftovers clung. He unwound the ropy flesh from his own quivering limb and let the dismembered coil fall to the boat bottom, where it twitched, flopped, and lay still.
"What is it?” someone asked. “What is it?” the call was echoed around the boat in quiet voices.
No one wanted to touch it, so no one did until the next day.
Baku stared down at the thing and wondered what it had once belonged to. All he had to judge it by was the lone, partial tentacle, and it did not tell him much. It was a sickly greenish brown and it came with a smell to match—as if it were made of old dung, spoiled crab meat, and salt; and suction pads lined one side, with thorny-looking spines on the other. He did not remember the bite of the spines, but his leg wore the results.
"What is it?” the question came again from one of his fellow soldiers, who poked at the leavings of the peculiar predator with the end of his gun.
"I don't know. Have you ever seen anything like it?"
"Never."
Never before that night had he seen anything like the tentacle. It represented no squid or octopus that Baku knew, and he had been born into a family that had fed itself from the water for generations. Baku thought he had seen everything the ocean had to offer, even from the bottom-most depths where the fish had blind-white eyes, and the sand was as fine as flour.
But he'd never seen a thing like that, and he would never forget it. The scars on his legs would remind him for the rest of his life, even when he was an old man, and living in America, and lying in bed on a cool spring night ... half dozing and half staring at the ceiling fan that slowly churned the air above him.
And it was that smell, and that remembered texture of stubborn rubber, that had reminded him of the sulfur stench at Guadalcanal.
Twice in his life now, he had breathed that nasty, tangy odor and felt a tough cord of flesh resist the push of his knife.
His stomach turned.
* * * *
The next day at work, Baku wondered if the store manager had noticed anything strange about the sushi. He asked him, “Are we getting different meat now? It seemed different yesterday, when I was cutting it for the crab rolls."
The manager frowned, and then smiled. “I think I know what you mean. We have a new vendor for some of the fish. It's a company from New England, and they carry a different stock from the gulf coast company. But they come with very good references, and they cost less money than the others, too. They distribute out of a warehouse downtown, by the pier at Manufacturer's Row."
"I see."
"Was there a problem with the fish that you noticed?"
Baku was torn.
He did not want to complain; he never liked to complain. The manager was happy with the new vendor, and there was little that was specific to complain about. What would he say? That the octopus meat reminded him of war?
"No,” he said. “No problem. I only noticed the change, that's all.” And he went back to work, keeping his eyes open for more of the mysterious meat.
He found it in the squid, and in the crab. It lurked amid the pale bits of ordinary fish and seafood, suspicious landmines of a funny smell and a texture that drove him to distraction.
Baku watched for the new vendor and saw him one day driving up in a
big white truck with a large “A” painted on the side. He couldn't make out the company's name; it was printed in a small, elaborate script that was difficult to read. The man who drove the truck was a tall, thin fellow shaped like an egg roll. His skin was doughy and hairless.
When he moved the chilled packages of sealed, wrapped food on the dolly, he moved with strength but without hurry. He walked like a sea lion, with a gently lumbering gait—as if he might be more comfortable swimming than walking.
His big, round eyes stared straight ahead as he made his deliveries. He didn't speak to anyone that Baku ever saw, and when he was handed a pen to sign for deliveries, he looked at it blankly before applying it to the proper forms.
"I think he's challenged,” the Sonada's manager said. “Mentally challenged, you know. Poor man."
"Poor man,” Baku agreed. He watched him get into his truck and drive away. He would be back on Tuesday with more plastic-wrapped boxes that emitted fogged condensed air in tiny clouds around their corners.
And meanwhile, business boomed.
Every night the restaurant was a little more packed, with a few more patrons. Every night the till rang longer, and the receipts stacked higher on the spike beside the register. Every night the waitresses ran themselves more ragged and collected more tips.
By Saturday, Sonada's was managing twice its volume from the week before. By Sunday, people were lined out the door and around the side of the building. It did not matter how long they were told to wait.
They waited. They were learning an unnatural patience.
Baku took on more hours, even though the manager told him it was not necessary. A new chef was hired to help with the added burden and another would have been helpful, but the kitchen would hold no more workers.
Baku insisted on the extra time. He wanted to see for himself, and to watch the other men who cut the sushi rolls and steamed the sticky rice. He wanted to see if they saw it too—the funny, pale meat the color of a pickle's insides. But if anyone noticed that something was out of order, no one spoke about it. If something was different, something must be good—because business had never been better.