A Broken River Books collection
Broken River Books
10765 SW Murdock Lane
Apt. G6
Tigard, OR 97224
Copyright: Deeper Waters © 2009, Nate Southard
He Stepped Through © 2010, Nate Southard
Something Went Wrong © 2012, Nate Southard
Safe House © 2014, Nate Southard
Cover art and design copyright © 2015 by Matthew Revert
www.matthewrevert.com
Interior design by J David Osborne
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-940885-23-0
Printed in the USA.
WILL THE SUN EVER COME OUT AGAIN?
NATE SOUTHARD
This one’s for Heather Harper Ellett.
Friend.
Lifeline.
Guardian of the Chai.
Wearer of cute shoes.
TO
THE FEARLESS ONES
an introduction by
Laird Barron
Nate Southard pinged my radar screen a few years ago with a brutal novella called Just Like Hell. That story caused a ripple in the horror community for the high-quality of the writing and a layered approach to sex and violence often lacking in literature. After reading Just Like Hell and a follow-up collection, Broken Skin, I added him onto my list of hard-nosed literary bruisers. The gunslingers. The blue-collar crowd. His work appealed to me on a fundamental level--structured with deceptive ease that belies a universe of nuance, and refreshingly unimpaired by the stranglehold Judeo-Christian mythology exerts upon the horror genre.
If you think you know someone from a handful of early-career stories, you’re being setup for a surprise. Southard arrived on the scene with the poise and capability of a veteran. That’s a rare accomplishment. What’s rarer is the kind of writer he’s matured into.
Yes, he’s tough as leather. He doesn’t pull his punches, he doesn’t flinch from the harsh truth, and he doesn’t coddle his characters or the reader. And no, he isn’t constrained by the usual paradigms. What Southard is, is one of the hardest working writers tilling the field. He’s a maestro in the art of lo-fi blood in your eye horror, psycho-slasher creepiness. That’s only the beginning of the particular madness he’s laying down: Horror is merely a sample of his palette. His narratives pitch into crime, science fiction, and pulp noir with admirable facility.
I possess a fondness for the Ellroy/Thompson end of the spectrum--scotch, lead, and femmes fatals, and so does Southard. His words smell of gun smoke that follows five rounds and whips of sparks through the barrel of a .41 magnum. He captures the reek of flop sweat and the baritone drone of murderous bastards talking themselves into another killing. He drives a story with steely-eyed recklessness down night-roads, tires screaming, headlights out, strange silhouettes rearranging through a windshield smashed to hell in a spider web of cracks.
Authors are in dialogue with their colleagues, living and dead. Everybody in this business is a product of his or her influences. The best flare with something like anger, more complicated, though, and after they’ve read enough and lived enough they say, enough, and push back, or punch up as if they’ve got something to prove, as if something vital is in the balance, as if something dear is on the line. Comparing his style to contemporaries, Southard slugs like Donald Ray Pollack, switches and jabs like Norman Partridge, but his angles are unorthodox and peculiar like a postmodernist stepped back to 1937 and said, “Mr. Lovecraft, before you go, there’s something I need to ask…”
It’s an admirable thing to chop against the grain, to be unafraid and unabashed regarding one’s affection for the grimy, pulpy roots of horror and suspense. Far too often for my taste, writers flee the influences that shaped them. Some taste commercial success, or heaven forfend, receive laurels from literary critics, and promptly disavow provenance. I’m not a horror writer! cries the author who built her success on multiple horror novels and collections. I don’t write science fiction, demurs the novelist who made his bones with dystopian yarns featuring super science and time travel. It’s a knock on genre, of course. It’s tantamount to saying that the genus that spawned them is a slumming ground; real art lies elsewhere. I admire those who reject such craven impulses. We live in a world that gave us the pulp genius of Robert E. Howard, the feminist retrofitting of fairytales by Angela Carter, and currently the visceral dark fantasy of Livia Llewellyn; each a wordsmith, each committed to artistry with such ferocious devotion that reading them for the first time is a shock to the senses, an experience that nicks the psyche.
The greatest and bravest artists are all in to the last chip, equivocations notwithstanding. Give me an honest heart, such as Ramsey Campbell’s, any day. Give me a writer who says, this is where I come from and this is what I do. Give me a straight-shooter such as the aforementioned Norman Partridge. Give me Nate Southard.
Presumably, I’ve provided you an inkling of what you’re in for just over the rise. There’s blood and violence in the offing. Sex and eeriness. Plain old weirdness with a capital W, too. Time-shifting vampires. Sinister black-ops agencies and the ruthless fixers who inhabit them. Home-grown terrorist cells versus primordial evil. Madness and mayhem undulates through the soft membrane of space-time. You will behold the unholy physiognomy of a dark god. You will fall beneath the shadow of immense and implacable mysteries.
Real human beings struggle amidst and against these forces. The greatest virtue of Southard’s blue-collar aesthetic lies in its authenticity. The pain is true. The suffering and the terror are true. So is the tenderness, the longing, the blood and the tears shed. Horror is powerless in a vacuum. Terror is wasted on cardboard dolls. Drama cannot exist if the actors are false, if the stakes are nonexistent. A writer who ventures into this dark corner of the imagination must surely know a bit about the darkness of the soul. He or she must comprehend how dread exerts influence upon the mind, how loss and bitterness poison the spirit. That writer must indulge the vicissitudes of raw emotion without succumbing. That writer must experience fear, passionately and profoundly, yet forge onward, a faithful interpreter of nightmares. That writer must be a fearless one.
Serendipitously for this field that I so cherish, we are honored with the contributions of bright lights such as Nathan Southard. He is wise in the ways of the heart. He knows storytelling is nothing without it.
—Laird Barron
Rifton, NY
December 18, 2014
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
HE STEPPED THROUGH
SOMETHING WENT WRONG
WATERS
SAFE HOUSE
AN AFTERWORD AND STORY NOTES
HE STEPPED THROUGH
MORNING
“Yo, Loop. Ready for this shit?”
Loop stares at his lap and giggles. B-Dawg gets it, but he needs homeboy on the clock. It’s business time.
“Loop?”
Homeboy stops giggling and checks out the scenery like it matters one fuck. “It’s cloudy. Ain’t been this cloudy in a long time.”
“Asked if you ready.”
“Will
the sun ever come out again?”
“Loop.”
“I’m cool.”
“Sure?”
“Fuck, yeah.”
“Good. We here. Let’s do it.”
“He stepped through?”
“He stepped through.”
Regina carries the plastic tray away from the counter and over to the booth where Carl and Shay bounce like nothing in the world can ever tire them. Cartoon smiles stretch across their faces, and both cheer when they see the tray. She likes that. Makes her feel wanted.
“Breakfast!” Shay cries.
“That’s right.” She sets down the tray and slides into the booth beside Carl. She has to sit next to him. Otherwise, he might lose interest in the meal and wander off. So long as she blocks the empty space beneath the table with her legs, she can control him. “Let’s see what we got. Sausage biscuit and OJ for Shay, bacon and eggs for Carl.”
“I don’t want eggs.”
“You wanted ‘em a minute ago.”
“That was then. Now I don’t want ‘em.”
“Well, now I paid for ‘em, so you gonna eat ‘em.”
“No.”
“Don’t test me. We don’t get to do this every day. Now eat so I won’t have to tan your little ass when we get home.”
“Damn.”
“You watch that mouth, Carl. Don’t make me tell you again.”
She sets a chocolate milk in front of her son and then turns to her own meal. The wax paper wrapping her sausage and egg is already slick with grease. She wads up the wrapper and drops it to the tray. The first bite of her biscuit tastes just fine, not at all like chalk or dirt. They taste that way sometimes.
Something squeals on the street. She looks up from the table as a Lincoln bounces off Alondra Boulevard and into the parking lot. Whoever is driving doesn’t bother parking, just brings the ride to a smoking halt in the driveway. The maneuver jumps her heart, tells her the driver’s either looking for fun or violence.
The Lincoln’s doors open, and two men climb out. She recognizes their colors. Gray Street Bangers.
“No.”
Regina grabs Carl’s hand, reaches across the table for Shay’s. They yell something as she starts to drag them from the booth, but then one of the bangers kicks open the door and their voices disappear, trampled under a stampede of screams.
“Little early in the morning for a prime-time style clusterfuck.”
Walker rolls his neck left and then right. A real bastard of a headache throbs at the base of his skull, and the motion doesn’t help the way he hoped. Perfect. “You know the bangers. No respect for a man’s schedule.”
“No shit. At least let me get through a fucking coffee.” Rawls’ voice is a low rumble, the sort of sound that might set off an earthquake. He tries to take a sip from the paper cup in his grip, but a pothole sends it sloshing over his hand instead. He hisses and shakes off a few drops, licks his fingers.
“Classy,” Walker says through the thinnest of grins. “You’re just classy all the way from your dick to your asshole.”
“Fuck you. You could drive, I wouldn’t have this problem.”
“Tell yourself that. See where it gets ya.”
“How about you just get us to the scene without planting us in a brick wall?”
“See what I can do.” He tears through the intersection of Alondra and Harris and then gives the car more gas. Two blocks, then he’ll see what kind of shithole he gets to spend the morning digging out.
Another day on the job. Hooray.
Regina hugs her babies to her chest and squeezes her eyes shut. Two more shots pop off, and the pack of screams grows a little thinner. Shay squirms against her side, sobbing. Carl remains quiet. He just lays there like he’s sleeping. Brave boy. Her brave little man.
One of the Gray Street boys keeps giggling. It’s a high, tittering sound that sets her teeth chattering and her body shivering. Sounds like a basehead on a bad fix. He was the one who started shooting. Just came through the door blasting and laughing. Her memory replays the teenage girl behind the counter and the way the back of her head blasted all over the food bin. Her eyes were still open when she fell, a look like a question shining in them.
“It’ll be okay,” Regina whispers to her babies. She doesn’t know if they can even hear her, but she doesn’t dare raise her voice. Last thing she wants is to attract attention.
Something crashes, and her entire body jumps. She opens her eyes and sees the other banger has kicked over one of the garbage cans. Half-empty cups spill their remaining contents, soda and orange juice mixing with a fan of paper wrappers and styrofoam containers.
The culprit jumps on top of the can’s enclosure and swings a pistol in a wide arc. The black metal fills her world.
“Who next?” the man yells. His voice sounds hollow, like he’s talking from the bottom of a deep hole.
The other keeps giggling. He stands behind the counter and drags the dead girl back to her feet. Regina sees her head appear above the counter. The laughing boy slings her over the steel surface, and something wet and gray falls out of her skull to splat across the floor.
Regina closes her eyes again. She pulls her kids as close as she can.
Why isn’t Carl moving?
Walker pulls the car over half a block from the fast food joint. A trio of squad cars have beat them there. A pair of blues works at closing off the street, waving the traffic back toward Caress. Hopefully somebody can set up some fucking saw horses soon. They don’t need to be wasting good uniforms on traffic detail.
He climbs out of the car and chases after Rawls. The redwood of a man is already chest to nose with the nearest blue.
“What are we looking at?”
“Two Gray Streets walked into the Edgar’s on the corner of Muriel and lit the place up.”
“Anybody get out?” Walker asks.
“Don’t know.”
“We just know they’re armed.”
“Yeah, and there’s two of them.”
“Hostages?”
“Yeah.”
Rawls shoots the uni a look. “How many?”
“Oh. Don’t know. Not quite the morning rush hour, so…”
“How many dead?” Walker asks. Impatience grows in him like a fever.
“Don’t know.”
“Thanks. You’re a testament to good police.”
A flash of anger in the kid’s eyes, but shame too. Fine. Maybe he’ll learn something.
Walker steps away, motions for Rawls to join him. He hears more sirens approaching, at least two.
“How you feeling?” he asks his partner.
“Pretty good.” Rawls shrugs. His thick shoulders stretch the T-shirt he wears. Gang Unit has a few perks, and ditching a suit every goddamn day sits in the top three.
“Any thoughts?”
“Gray Street turf. No reason for boys to be going apeshit. They been quiet for weeks now.”
“Better to make some noise.”
“In their own back yard?”
“Maybe some Locos wandered in, wanted to wave their balls around.”
“Doesn’t feel right.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Walker breathes deep. Compton stinks to high fuck most days, and today is anything but an exception. The scents of hot tar and old grease fill his nose like a wad of dirty cotton. After nearly five years he thinks he should be used to it, but it never gets any better. It settles in his lungs and starts to rot. Maybe it will eat him up like cancer some day.
“So you wanna wait for SWAT?”
Rawls grins. “Not really.”
“We can cut through some yards, come up from the rear.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Tell the babies. Then we’re moving.”
“You! Open your eyes.”
Regina hears the command but doesn’t obey. If she doesn’t follow, then he can’t be talking to her. It’s somebody else. Plenty of people still screaming. He’s talkin
g to one of them, not her. Never her.
“Bitch, I told you open your damn eyes. Don’t make me cut ‘em open.”
She hears footsteps, paper cups skittering across dirty tile. He’s not coming for her. Somebody nearby, but not—
A hand grabs her hair and jerks into a fist.
A scream rips loose from her throat as her eyes snap open. She sees the black hole of a gun barrel and nothing else. Shay cringes in her arm but Carl sits still like a good boy. He feels wet, though. Maybe he’s gone and peed himself. She wants to do the same.
“Yo, bitch! You do what I damn-well say when I damn-well say it. Don’t go pissing me off!”
She hears a whimper deep in her throat and she hates herself for it. She’s been telling herself for years that she ain’t afraid of these Gray Street punks, and now here she is, making baby sounds. She tries to screw up her face into a defiant sneer, but her jaw trembles. Her lips quiver. Tears sting at her eyes.
She hates herself, but she’s too scared to do anything other than stare into the black hole of the gun’s barrel.
Shay pulls tighter, arms cinching around her neck. The world swims around her. The black hole wavers and then grows. The other Gray Street boy keeps giggling in the background, and she hears a new noise, something wet and ripping. She tries to place the sound, but her thoughts are too heavy and slow, the black hole too wide.
Maybe she’ll go to sleep. That could be okay. She won’t be afraid there.
The fist in her hair jerks again, and another scream wakes her. The angry hand disappears, only to return as a slap across her face. Somehow, the attack convinces Regina to ease up, and her breath returns in a cold, stinking rush.
“Look at me, bitch!”
She does her best, fighting for focus, trying to see something other than the black hole. She finds a face and takes inventory of its features. The lips twist into a sneer. The nostrils flare and blow hot breath. The eyes burn with something she hasn’t seen before. There’s anger in there, but something else too. It’s not the posturing she’s seen before from these Gray Street boys. This is something worse. It swirls out of control, casting shadows, and she thinks it might be insanity.
Will the Sun Ever Come Out Again? Page 1