Table of Contents
-Blown by Pat MacEwen
-Jerrod Steihl Goes Home by Ian Withrow
-The Immolation Scene by John F.D. Taff
-A Body at Rest by Lorne Dixon
-By the Time I Get to Five by J.S. Reinhardt
-Notes for an Article on Bainbridge Farm by Bentley Little
-Noise by Sanford Allen
-Almost Home by Kevin Lucia
-Pillars of Light by Michael A. Arnzen
-Footprints Fading in the Desert by Eric J. Guignard
-The Vulture’s Art by Benjamin Kane Ethridge
-Activate by Boyd E. Harris
-Snow Globe by Adam Howe
-Intruders by Taylor Grant
-The Boathouse by Stephen McQuiggan
-Bath Time by Jeff Strand
-The Happiness Toy by Ray Garton
-The Oldest Profession by Tracie McBride
-The House That Sang by Andrew Stockton
-Bad Seed by Anne Michaud
-Gourd by P. Gardner Goldsmith
-Silent Stones by Steve Vernon
-The Emu in the Sky by Mark Farrugia
-Ambrosia by Dev Jarrett
-Follower by Danny Rhodes
-Catacombs by Kristin Dearborn
-Whispers in the Wax by Tonia Brown
-The Mirror Box by Charles Colyott
-The Local Haunt by Janine-Langley Wood
+Horror Library+ Volume 5
First Edition Trade Paperback, October, 2013
All Rights Reserved
Cutting Block Press
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Copyright © 2013 Cutting Block Press LLC. Individual works are Copyright © 2013 by their respective authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All characters in this publication are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Editors in Chief:
R.J. Cavender
Boyd E. Harris
Associate Editor:
Patrick Beltran
Proofreaders:
A.J. Brown
Michelle Garren Flye
Patrick Beltran
Reading/Selection Team:
R.J. Cavender
Boyd E. Harris
Patrick Beltran
Elias Siqueiros
A.J. Brown
Ennis Drake
Erik Smetana
Lee Thompson
Layout and Design:
Bailey Hunter
Cover Art:
“Zombie Land”
Danielle Tunstall
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This book is dedicated to you, the reader. I appreciate your loyalty throughout the years and hope the stories in this book will entertain you. As long as I feel your presence, I will keep the flame going, through Horror Library, Volume 6 and beyond.
R.J. Cavender
-Blown
by Pat MacEwen
It was late afternoon when I got to the park. A gorgeous day about two weeks into spring. I remember the bright green grass, the deep blue sky, and how much I admired the lavender-flowered plum trees along the north-side city streets. Not my usual venue, since I was working swing shift, and most of the major calls come in later, when people have had time to settle in from work and crack a six-pack, eye the spousal unit, and lose all sense of proportion.
Then again, this wasn’t your typical Assault with a Deadly Whatever. I could see that much as soon as I reached the yellow ribbons of crime scene tape. There were squad cars all over the place, and a ladder truck from the fire department, backing up their paramedics. An ambulance had just pulled up onto the sod, and the watch commander’s unmarked car was planted in the middle of a side street simply because there was no more room at the curb.
Instead of the usual crowd of disheveled junkies, stick-thin crack ho’s, dead-eyed dope dealers, winos and petty thieves hanging around at a typical shooting scene downtown, we had clots of solid citizens–a bunch of guys in khakis and t-shirts, one still sporting bits of the lawn he’d just been mowing when the sirens converged on their neighborhood. Women in designer jeans and mod-looking sandals and gardening gloves herded kids of various ages. Suburban kids–well fed, well dressed, and without any sign of track marks or scars or the bone-deep wariness you’ll see in street kids around anyone in uniform.
The center of all the activity seemed to be the tiny playground out in the middle of all that grass, a sandbox sort of thing with monkey bars, a carousel, and a swing set. I got out and grabbed my bag, the strap biting into my shoulder as if it had teeth, thanks to forty pounds of camera gear and tools and such. I had to schlep it past the ambulance to get to my goal, but as I came alongside the great white whale on wheels, the back doors flew open. The right-side door nearly clipped me. I had to jump sideways, almost falling, unbalanced by the weight of my gear.
I opened my mouth to complain, and it stayed that way as a gurney came at me, propelled by a pair of EMTs. On it, an eight-year-old boy lay strapped to a backboard, a white kid with dark, tousled hair and small, neatly formed ears. His left eye seemed to be looking right at me, but the pupil was blown–the dark center five times its usual size and the brown iris almost invisible. The right eye wasn’t there at all.
I knew already that he was gone. They’d strapped an oxygen mask over his face, and he might still be breathing, but I’ve seen blown pupils before and I knew full well there was nobody home.
That realization hit me hard, because this was a kid. Just a kid. Then a woman’s voice cut me in two with a long drawn-out wail of pain and dread and urgency. I looked up in time to see Mom sprinting across the park, her arms thrust out as if she thought she could snatch up her boy from a good fifty yards away. It was a foot race I’d seen once before, when my much younger brother was only a year old and wandered away from our picnic bench, heading straight for the barbecue pit. Then I saw my Mom do that very same F-15 strafing run, racing across the bright green grass while she cried out a warning she knew her toddler would not understand. But my mother managed to outrun her child. She succeeded in scooping him up just before he could topple into the pile of red-hot coals and burn himself to bits. She had the chance to save her baby boy, who still had both of his blue eyes, who wasn’t staring up at me, at eternity, with an eye that saw nothing at all. As this mom ran toward me, she too called out her son’s name, and beneath all that panic lay a thread of cold, desperate hope.
She doesn’t know.
She doesn’t know, and I won’t have to be the one who tells her.
Thank God. With an instantaneous, near-sickening flash of relief, and of cowardice, I backed away from the gurney. As they began loading it into the ambulance, the woman arrived and launched herself at her son. The nearest medic, a slender Hispanic guy with a pencil-thin moustache, succeeded in fending her off, but then he let her climb into the back for the ride to the hospital. I caught his eye as he slammed the doors shut on his patient, his partner, and his unwanted passenger. A white-hot flicker of shared perception sparked between us, and we both looked away, as if by breaking that flash of unspoken communication we could somehow change the outcome.
He turned to get past a patrolman, and then he was out of sight. Moments later, the rig was gone too, and I trudged toward the playground with an additional weight on my back and that mother’s voice still echoing in my head.
It was my job to handle the perp t
hat day–another kid. The victim’s brother, it turned out. The two of them and a younger cousin had all been messing around at the playground, and one of them scuffed up a gun in the sand beneath the swing set. A little two-shot, pearl-handled derringer someone had buried there.
Why the hell?
Who knows? A drug dealer hiding it from a narc, or some fool who dropped it and just didn’t notice, or maybe some kid who’d found or stolen it and stashed the weapon there, meaning to come back and get it again when the grown-ups weren’t looking.
We never did figure it out.
The three kids were no help. One of them found it, and they all three handled it, thinking the damn thing was some kind of toy. Then, with a flash of real insight, the youngest one urged her older cousin not to play with it. The gun might be real.
“It’s not either,” he insisted. “See?” Raising the gun, he took aim at his brother and pulled the trigger.
That’s the kid I had to photograph and test for gunshot residue. He was a zombie at that point, too shell-shocked to speak, let alone resist anything I did. I took my shots and swabbed his hands as quietly and carefully as I could, but it was clear that a piece of him had died as well, and he just didn’t know it yet. Then I collected the gun, the derringer still loaded with that second bullet, and rendered it safe. I took it back to the shop to try and get fingerprints off it, or a serial number or something, so we could find someone to blame for all this, somebody who could be punished for planting a gun where a kid could find it, for setting that boy up to die like that, and for having made all of us feel like that.
I had no luck, and if it was a bad day for me, it was worse for my partner. He took the hospital half of the call, so it was his job to photograph the victim, who was on life support by then and scheduled for organ donation. My partner took close-ups, including that eye staring off into nowhere, so he knew the score. The kid was gone, but he still had to test the victim’s hands for gunshot residue, just to make sure we were getting the story straight about who had fired the fatal round. Knowing the kid was brain-dead, he didn’t try to be quiet. He tried to be quick, to get gone before the kid’s mom came back in.
Gloved up, he took that slender hand in his and dabbed at the skin around the thumb, the palm, and the wrist with a sticky bottle cap meant to collect any particles of metal, gunpowder, and soot that might have adhered to the nearest surfaces when the gun went off. Then he swabbed the hand, using a 5% solution of nitric acid to dissolve and collect any nitrate residue that might be present. But while he was doing this, holding hands with the vic while he applied the swab, the kid had one of those motor reflexes that persist long after anyone’s there to do such things on purpose. The boy squeezed his hand, and my partner freaked.
When he told me about it later, his face was three shades paler than normal, his voice uneven. He stared at the floor, unwilling to meet my eye.
When those things happen, you learn not to push it, to back away and let the other party have some space and quiet time. He’d done the same for me a few weeks before when I was called out to a duplex located on Kelley Drive. Pretty much the whole street is Section Eight housing, the residents getting subsidized rental rates thanks to HUD, so there are a lot of welfare cases living there. Many are part of the various refugee communities we acquired from Southeast Asia following the fall of Saigon–Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese and Hmongs. I was used to that, to dealing with eight-year-olds who’d picked up some English in school and could translate for me when I spoke to their parents and had to ask questions about case numbers or where the point of entry was on a burglary.
This time, I didn’t need a translator. The call had started out as domestic violence. Most of the time, for me, that means a quick visit and nothing more than taking photos of injuries, and there was indeed a woman there with a broken nose and blood streaming down her battered face and her torn blue blouse. She was Vietnamese, and sailing along the thin edge of hysteria. Her broken English was so heavily accented I didn’t get much of what she was saying. Not my job, in any case. But while I was putting my camera together, detectives walked in, and my heart stuttered. There was no body in sight, but for somebody somewhere it didn’t look good. It didn’t look good at all.
I wound up doing a full-blown crime scene work-up; photos, blood spatter analysis, measurements, everything. While I worked, I caught the threads of the case from the dicks on scene. The Viet woman had left her husband, who was a wife-beater. Lacking a breadwinner, burdened by limited English and job skills, she went on welfare. She had an 11-month-old baby boy, and was eligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But the Welfare Department forced her to sue her ex for child support, and he didn’t like it. He showed up, expressed his feelings, and broke her nose in the process of taking the baby away from her. Then he grabbed the kid by his heels. Papa swung the screaming child around like a sledge hammer, smashing his head into a kitchen cabinet.
You could see the dent, and some overturned second-hand furniture. Not much of a crime scene, really. Other than Mom’s bloody nose, the deed only involved that one blow to the head, and the first one doesn’t spatter blood, not even if it cuts the scalp wide open. No, it’s the second blow, and the ones that follow. With them you get splashes, and cast-off, and downflow, and finally gravity pooling.
I finished the scene up as fast as I could and then headed out to the County Hospital. Mom had been transported there while I was still sketching the layout of her tiny kitchen and living room. Bare bones, too, because she didn’t have much of anything, not even photos. So I didn’t actually see the vic until I got to the ER.
Eleven months old, and Vietnamese. He was tiny and brown-skinned. And perfectly formed. And beautiful. The kind of kid you pray for when you get pregnant. The kind I’d prayed for. I think that’s what got to me, on top of everything else. I would have given anything for a baby like that, and knew by then it would never happen–and this guy had taken that blessing and destroyed it. The baby’s skull had fractured from the impact. His brain swelled up, and in trying to relieve that lethal pressure, the doctors had opened his skull and inserted a drainage tube. It looked like the Tin Man’s hat, that short tube sticking up out of all that white bandaging.
The nurse told me they were getting him ready for a Medevac flight to the UC Davis Medical Center, where they had a cutting edge pediatric trauma ward. I nodded, but knew it would do no good. One glance at that infant’s half-open eyes said so. Both of his pupils were blown.
I remember the way the rage came shooting up through me like an eruption of lava. My hands shook, I wanted so badly to find that child’s father, lay hold of him, and bash his brains out with whatever was handy. I couldn’t, of course. He was long gone, God knew where, and even if I’d known where he was, I had a job to do. So I did it. I shoved all that fury down deep and buried it beneath what felt like a layer of asphalt somewhere just south of my heart. Then I picked up my camera. I cranked up the shutter speed to make up for my trembling grip and keep the photos from being blurred. As soon as I had enough room to come closer, I took my photos and packed up my gear.
I remember thinking, “I’m done here. Thank God.”
Then, just down the hallway by ten feet or so, someone told the boy’s mother what his chances were. She’d been treated by then. She was no longer bleeding, and knew that her son was still breathing, and I suppose she was hoping for some kind of miracle. Modern medicine, Western style, could surely fix anything. Only it can’t.
She let loose with that wail of agony I’d heard before, and the sound of it, that unbearable pain, shot me right through the heart.
I staggered back and hit the doorjamb, which saved me from falling down. Then I got out of there, as fast as I could, and was actually grateful when that particular case never did come to court, so that I wouldn’t have to go over those photos and relive all that, wouldn’t have to re-share his mother’s distress when they finally told her the boy’s prognosis. I later heard th
e perp fled to Texas, where he changed his name and disappeared into one of the Viet fishing communities down there on the Gulf. So far as I know, the man’s never been caught. But I know this much. If he ever is, and he’s brought back here, they had better never leave him alone with me.
When I started the job, I thought I knew what horror was. I’d seen people die, and then I’d helped clean up their corpses. I’d spent time in scary places. I’d had a couple close brushes with death on my own account, and known others who weren’t so lucky. I loved history, and reading Stephen King stories, and going to gore-fest movies, and so I thought I knew.
But that was before I was sent over to Dameron Hospital one mild summer night in June, before I saw the two-year-old taking up only half of a gurney. Someone had brought her in, I was told, but she was already dead. Her small body bore dozens of bruises, new and old, purple and yellow and green. She was pretty, with curly dark hair and enormous eyes. She was naked because they’d found blood in her diaper. So I had to take more photos, collect the diaper, take ID fingerprints off the corpse, and then head out to the place on Van Buren Street where the baby girl’s mother lived. It was a fourplex, with a pair of two-bedroom apartments upstairs, and a couple more downstairs. A ratty sort of neighborhood, although the apartment was orderly. I joined my partner, already at work upstairs, and we processed the place according to the protocols for a murder scene.
The bathroom got lots of attention because there was no sign of violence. Which meant that someone had cleaned up after doing whatever was done to that child. Didn’t know then, not for sure, because they didn’t do the rape kit until she was autopsied, out at the morgue. But bloody diapers are a definite clue, and it didn’t take much to imagine the brutal cause of death. So we took the drains apart in the bathroom and did the phenolphthalein test to check for the presence of blood.
Taped to the wall behind the toilet, there was a small hand-lettered sign that read, “Mondo’s Throne.”
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