"Take it easy, Gerald."
I spin the wheel and pull back on to the main road, this time heading north. I drive for nearly forty-five minutes, the only living creature among miles and miles of desert. And when I think I see something shapeless and black moving alongside the highway, I can't help but slam on the brakes and straddle the highway's center line like a tightrope walker. And I think, Chupacabra! I am breathing heavy and sweat stings my eyes. Behind me, somewhere in the darkness, I hear Martin assure me that the chupacabra are not real. Vampire devils. Goat-suckers. His face, he says—what they did to his face is real, but the goat-suckers are not.
It is always brighter the moment you step out of a vehicle in the desert, no matter how dark it is. Now, it is cold, too. When people think of perishing in the desert, they usually don't imagine themselves freezing to death, but that is the truth of it.
I step around the side of the ice cream truck, my ears keying in on every desert sound. The chatter of insects is deafening. I cannot seem to get my heartbeat under control. With one hand tracing along the body of the truck, I move to the rear of the vehicle and peer through the darkness. I am not shocked when I see the reflective glow of two beady eyes staring back at me from the cusp of the highway; rather, a dull sense of fatigue overwhelms me.
It is a coyote. I see it clear enough as it turns and scampers further down the shoulder of the roadway. And while I am relieved, I am quickly accosted by a delayed sense of fear that causes my armpits to dampen beneath my sweatshirt and my mouth to go dry. I turn and begin to head back to the cab when I hear a sound—some sound, some thump—echo from the rear of the truck. From within.
My footfalls are soundless on the blacktop of the midnight highway. There is no lock on the rear doors—just a simple bolt slid into a ring. Unhinging the bolt, I peel the doors open and stare into the black maw of the truck. The sick-sweet stink of decay breathes out. I climb into the rear of the truck. There are coolers affixed to the floor and metal boxes on shelves. There are a number of cardboard ice cream boxes lining the shelves here too, but they are empty and so ancient that a slick, brown mildew coats every box. Looking down, I expect the coolers to be locked with padlocks, but they are not, and I am surprised.
Chupacabra? I wonder, and open one of the coolers. The hinges squeal and I fumble around my jacket pocket for a pen light. Shine the light into the back of the truck.
At first, it does not even register with me. And even after it does, I do not fully understand what I am looking at.
There are a number of them, bronze-skinned and wide-eyed, staring up at me, pressed so closely together that they are indistinguishable from one another. They reek of fear and sweat, their expressions just as uncomprehending as my own. Their clothes are filthy, their faces greasy with perspiration. So many of them, it is a wonder they can even fit. Finally, before I ease the cooler lid down, one of them says, "Muchacho."
"I'm sorry," I say…although I am unsure if I am actually speaking or am just hearing the words funnel through my head. And I hear Martin saying, They did me real good, for driving the truck into the river.
It is a long, quiet ride back across the border.
About Ronald Malfi
Ronald Malfi was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977. Along with his family, he eventually relocated to Maryland where he spent most of his childhood growing up along the Chesapeake Bay. He professed an interest in the arts at an early age and is also known to be a competent artist and musician. In 1999, he graduated with a degree in English from Towson University. For a number of years, he fronted the Maryland-based alternative rock band Nellie Blide.
Ronald Malfi is the author of the well-received novel Snow and most recently, The Ascent. Recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi's horror novels and thrillers have transcended genres to gain wider acceptance among readers of quality literature. He currently lives along the Chesapeake Bay. You can visit Ronald Malfi at: http://www.ronmalfi.com
THE ORPHANS OF LETHE
by Rachel Coles
The "blessed" day finally arrived with cussing that would have boiled holy water into steam. We checked into the hospital. I don't think we were in the labor suite for twenty minutes before my husband Bill ogled at the Romanesque design of the bathroom. I imagined choking him and ripping his nuts off. That helped, but not as much as the epidural.
Before my eyes slid shut, I zoned out and stared at a shadow in the corner behind the heart monitor, and realized that it wasn't the shadow of the monitor.
A day later, Bill wandered into my room with the rich aroma of pastrami and buttery rye following him like an elderly Brooklyn deli phantom, poaching my fries on the way.
"I got your Reuben, as requested."
"Are you eating my fries?"
He paused, an errant fry poking out of his mouth. "No…just quality assurance…"
I snatched the bag and stuck my entire face inside, inhaling the greasy goodness. "Stay out of my food, or I'll eat you."
He snorted and leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs. "I heard something interesting today. They're closing down one of the last units for psychiatric folks in the city at University Hospital. The only one left will be Denver Health. If Denver's full, they'll have to go to Fort Logan, or get shuffled through the Emergency Department and then back out onto the street."
"University is closing their psychiatric unit?" I said through mouthfuls of meat. "I thought they just got that new huge building. It was supposed to be the whole point of moving out to the east end of nowhere, so they could have more room. What are they doing with it after the psych unit closes?"
"Luxury rooms for the wealthy. They want to attract more money to the hospital. So they are turning the space that used to be the psych ward into single-patient rooms for body-scans." Bill shook his head. "I'll be doing the rest of my residency in the park across from the Denver Rescue Mission, because that's where my low-income, mentally ill patients will end up."
I stopped chewing and looked around at my own semi-lavish surroundings in the labor room.
He seemed to read my thoughts and smiled. "Don't feel so guilty. They wouldn't have turned this back into a mental health wing anyway. The suites in the previous labor and delivery wing were like prison cells. They needed an overhaul."
I poked at a blob of sauerkraut, and glanced out the window. A blanket of snow was swirling around lumps of roadside dirt and iced grime until everything was shifting, glittering white. The wind blew a cruel blast against the double-pane. My attention was caught by my own reflection in the mirror. My image and I swiped at a beige smear of Thousand Island dressing on the wrong cheek. Bill laughed as I pawed both my hands over my face and licked the dressing off my hand.
Then the eyes in the mirror changed. They weren't smiling or laughing anymore. The face was an expressionless mask. As soon as I focused on it, the face became my face again. I glanced at Bill, but he was busy eying the other half of my sandwich.
It was good to be home, minus dozens of hours of sleep. A chilly draft blasted across the room when Bill came in from work, bundled in a hat and scarf and smelling like frost and ozone. No paternity leave for the wicked.
"Shut the door!" I squealed and dove beneath a mound of flowered fleece. Baby Tom snuggled against my chest in a swath of fabric, yawned, and looked unimpressed by the waft of frigid air.
"It's windy. Jeez. You've been here for five years. Aren't you ever going to get used to cold? Oh yeah, I forgot, your people have been lost in the desert for forty years. Would you feel more comfortable if I shipped in some sand dunes?" He ducked as a couch pillow sailed past his head and whumped against the front door.
"Sure! Ask your people to build us a teepee," I shot back.
He grinned, "Wrong tribe, dork! We lived in longhouses. And…hell no."
"Whatever. You all look alike."
He shook his fist and kissed me on the top of the head, kissed Tom on his button nose and crossed his eyes at t
he baby. Tom stared at him in fascination. His head wobbled off my chest and he grabbed Bill's finger, pulling it toward his mouth. "Oh, guess what! He's hungry again, what a surprise! 'Feed me, Seymour.'"
I sighed. "I'm tapped out. We'll need to use formula."
"I can take this shift if you want to sleep early."
"Are you sure? You just got off call."
"Maybe so, but I'm going to have a hard time sleeping right now anyway. One of my patients didn't come back for her follow up. The schizophrenic girl from Russia. Police found a body matching her description in the alley behind the King Soopers on Thirteenth Street. It looks like she died of exposure." He slumped into the worn chair across from me. "We should have kept her, but there weren't any spots left on the unit. It was an insane night, and now that folks from the VA are being shipped over too..."
I felt badly for him. I knew he was wondering if he could have somehow prevented the woman's fate. "It wasn't your decision to release her. It was the attending doc."
"I know. But I just can't stop thinking about how somehow, this is my fault."
"It isn't your fault." I handed Tom over because I knew it would help, and it did. Bill's face relaxed and lit up as Tom gurgled and drooled onto his scrubs.
A few weeks in a tiny house with no sleep and my 'helpful,' anxious mother drove me out into the cold, looking for commodities we needed at the store. Or anything. Once I was done in the supermarket, I rattled the cart briskly toward my car in the parking lot. Tom was just a fuzzy mountain of blankets in the cart with two dark eyes peeping out.
Suddenly a voice startled me, causing my heart to try to leap out of my chest. "Just feel free to run me over! Christ, I'm homeless, not invisible!"
I gasped and jumped a foot in the air when the grungy figure near the sidewalk moved toward me. "I'm so sorry!" I cried before I could think. Then, as I tried to calm my rapidly beating heart, I told him, "I know you're not invisible, but I really didn't see you."
His hard eyes softened. "It's all right. I didn't mean to scare you. You got a little one there. Boy or girl?" He peered at Tom.
"Boy."
"He's a teeny one! How old?"
"A few weeks."
"Jesus Christ! What're you doin' out in this weather?"
"I've been in the house for three weeks. My mother's been here for two."
He laughed. "I see. You needed a little fresh air and a little get-away."
I dug for my wallet.
"You don't have to do that, miss. I don't want your money. I'm doin' all right." He held up his cup of ratty bills. "I got the shelter at night, my coat, my wits."
His wrinkled, leathery face grew distant for a second. "That's more 'n some out here…" He drifted off, and then his eyes sharpened, and he said, "It's really cold, and here comes the rent-a-cop. You'd better get that little bundle of yours inside."
As a square-shouldered security guard stalked toward us, the homeless man warned, "You be careful. Some folks out here aren't okay."
"What do you mean?"
"The weather makes it worse for some of us," the homeless man explained. "People get lonely, and scared of dyin' out here. Nobody sees them, like you didn't see me with your cart."
"I said I was sorry."
"I know you are. But before that cop gets here to chase me off, let me finish. Some of us homeless folk start out just like you. Nice home, nice job. And then they get sick, and they never get better. You know, 'cause they're sick in the head. Some from addictions, others, from no reason other than just because. And then their families don't want 'em, or can't keep track of 'em, and after a while, the sick people are on their own."
He hesitated, then turned to me and lowered his voice, like he was going to let me in on a secret. "Their names get lost. Their real names, not what we call them. Hell, I hang out with the likes of Dirty Pete, Hobo Jim, Nuke Girl, and Old Crystal. They have their stories. But after a while, sometimes they lose those, too." He nodded at me and bobbed his chin toward the security guard who now stood in front of us.
"You can't stay here, sir," the security guard said.
"Have a nice night, Miss." My acquaintance loped off across the street.
I hurried to my car and shivered while Tom pulled the strings out of the puff-ball on my hat that was sitting on top of the Cocoa Puffs.
Sleep deprivation did odd things to my perception. One night I awoke during the wee hours to Tom's hungry cries from the other room, and turned on the light by my bed.
When I sat up, my shadow didn't move.
I paused, at first thinking I was still asleep, locked within a dream. I rubbed the sand out of my eyes, and looked again. My shadow seemed to move back and forth, right at the peripheral edges of my sight. When I looked directly, it was a normal silhouette cast by the lamp light.
And then I noticed that the reflection in the mirror on top of my dresser also moved out of synch in my peripheral vision. It was still when I looked at it. My memory tugged at me; I had seen something like this before and was overwhelmed with a strong feeling of déjà vu.
And then I remembered the heart monitor in the labor room when I had delivered Tom. I slid off the bed and threw my sheet over the mirror. I swept through the hallway to the baby's room, grabbed Tom, and threw on the lights and the TV. Then I sat, feeding Tom and trembling until I fell asleep with him wrapped in my arms.
The alley was dirty, like a dozen alleys, like every alley. A lump of dingy clothes were piled in the corner nook next to a dumpster, almost buried under a blizzard drift. The lump had a smudged, pale face surrounded by an unraveling hat and shawl. Her delicate, frost-rimed eyelashes looked like dragonfly lace. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were parted and cracked. Her rough hands rested upon her chest. An empty cigarette package was barely discernible under the snow that was heaped upon parts of her body, and an empty lighter dangled from her fingers that were the colors of the Arctic sea.
I jerked awake. I had never seen Bill's Russian girl, but it was dream logic. Let's just stick Darth Vader and Yoda in there and call it a day, I thought. A groan escaped me as I stood up and trudged with Tom into his room as the watery light outside paled. He was still asleep and I was ready to fall over.
Maybe the dream affected me. Or maybe it was the homeless man I had met outside the grocery store who'd been dismissed by the security guard.
But I started volunteering at the Denver Rescue Mission in June. I sat at donations intake and sifted through an ocean of boxes, sorting piles of pants, shirts and other clothing articles. It was amazing the things people got rid of because they didn't have the time to barter on Ebay or hold a good old-fashioned garage sale. All hail the alley recycling system. I found a Chinese gong once, a set of skis, and a baby iguana in a full-sized tank, complete with the topping from a Big Mac that some kid probably figured it would eat. If I found it, it ended up here at the shelter. Jana, the operations manager, peered at the stuff and then at the door, on the other side of which was a legion waiting to receive my alley-finds when the doors opened.
"Seems like there's more every day," Jana said, nodding at the crowd.
"Economy," I said. That was a great explanation for everything these days.
She snorted. "Then how come even when the economy is booming, we still have hoards of homeless? You know that most of these folks have mental problems no matter what Wall Street is doing." She knew everybody there. She could tell you anything about anyone, and often did.
There was Hobo Jim. He was an old-fashioned boxcar hobo. He hopped trains. He had started out as the manager of a company, and then his wife died, the love of his life. Whatever had happened to her had destroyed him. From that point on, the material world had no interest for him. He lived day to day, enjoying the open sky and stars and the people he met. He was a gentle soul who wished every person he saw on the street a great day and really meant it. It was a good day for him if he saw you smile.
There was Old Crystal. No one knew how old he was. He loved
the magic mushrooms, or had before meth had come along. Then he'd loved the meth for years that had seemed like hours to him. His teeth and skin were rotted from consuming the food of Faery. One night, after he had run out of his stash, the demon music faded and the dancers vanished. The powers the Queen had given him were gone and he lay alone, hacking with pneumonia in an abandoned house that he saw as a feasting hall. A cop had found him because of a complaint report and, instead of taking him to the station, had taken him to a hospital. He had been clean for a year, but still couldn't keep a job or a home. The fairies still followed him around corners, compelling him every second he was awake, offering him things he couldn't touch. And then, they laughed and cavorted in his dreams.
There was Patrick Reilly, the homeless man I had nearly run over with my cart outside the supermarket. Patrick Reilly, from Boston. That was his real name, and he insisted that others use it. He never talked about his past or his life. "What's done is done. Life goes on," he would say, gazing at you with eyes that could have been those of a twenty-year-old, or a sixty-year-old, or centuries older. But he always held onto his name.
And then there was Nuke Girl, or had been until last winter. Nuke Girl was the Russian woman Bill had told me about, and she had talked to animals and thought they talked back. She had gotten her moniker because she smoked like Chernobyl, and always offered a light. Jana suspected she had been smuggled here and then forced into the sex trade to pay her passage. Until she died, this had been the longest Nuke Girl had ever stayed in a place.
As I left the crowd to go pick up Tom, someone said that Old Crystal was in the hospital again. Patrick Reilly shook his head and spat near the scraggly base of a tree. "He likes them hospitals. Course, I would, too, if I was in his shape. He's falling to pieces."
What Fears Become: An Anthology from The Horror Zine Page 17