Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 1

by Jeff Strand

  Meat, he hadn’t even bitten all the way through Clay’s earlobe. Mistake like that would have cost him if he’d been one of his own fight dogs.

  Clay started the truck.

  He hit the gas, Meat crawling toward him, at the front of the ring. One arm over the low wall, teeth gritted in that anatomy-chart face—at the last instant he jerked up and seemed to blink his lidless, eyeless eyes. Then the semi plowed through him and the low wall and clove the roof down the middle, slamming to a halt on the jumble of dead men and dead dogs in a cloud of dust and falling wood debris.

  Clay dropped down from the cab, sunlight pouring in where holes weren’t supposed to be, yelling and pounding and bumping inside the trailer where people weren’t supposed to be, and the floor around the tractor unit streaked with gore. Meat’s body laid out in a smeary contortion of limbs and spine and what looked like a raw ham hock with hair and, “lift, bro?” more identifiable than the rest of him sticking out under the fuel tank. It reeked of slaughter.

  End of the line.

  Clay staggered out of the ring where he’d entered, strapped on his shoulder holster. Doleful eyes watched him. He was always amazed at how tender the world could be in the aftermath of violence. Odor of gunpowder, corpses and spent cartridges strewn around the field and the chained dogs gazing at him like sad mothers. Sun blazing down on the rape he’d made of man and earth.

  Sin Mountain, Clay’s masterpiece.

  I’m everything I hate, he thought.

  He wandered through the carnage.

  I’ve turned my truck, my sanctuary, into a weapon. I’ve turned Jimmy into a weapon. I’ve turned my body into a weapon. I’ve disgraced my teacher, my art. And I’ve walked on four legs, I’ve tasted the flesh of my enemy.

  For the second time that day, Clay dropped to all fours.

  His bowels seized, and conscience shot from him like it would never stop. It erupted with the force of weeping held back for years, racking gut-sobs of inestimable loss. His body wept for itself, every monstrous thing he’d made it do and remember. A river of death, sludgy and putrid, flooded from his mouth, bounteous and indifferent to his torment. He clawed the earth, hands soaked in mud and the pain of men, until only drool came and he fell on his back. Blue throbbed in his vision, death sky-written where no birds soared.

  Then he slipped into dreamless sleep, black as the prison where Meat’s people cried out.

  •

  Wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka

  The Pac-Man ring tone jerked Clay awake.

  Wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka

  He got to his feet and drew Jimmy One.

  Something caught his eye near the trail. A figure fleeing toward the woods. He had the impression it wasn’t clothed, and didn’t know how to run. Arms flailing, feet slapping down like clown shoes. Body of a lanky, undersize youth, how Clay was when he was twelve, swallowed by another forest. Only this stranger seemed eager, even desperate, to plunge into the woods.

  No visible musculature, no butt crack, no hair even. The dogs saw it, too, watched it dash past, this live mannequin. They looked at Clay then. Their eyes said, What are you going to do?

  He holstered the gun. Whoever it was could have attacked him and opted for escape. His gut—what he hadn’t puked, what was left of it—told him he had a mess to clean up.

  Morbid curiosity made him check the mountain he’d heaved, only to find the ground was clean. Not a scrap of Clay’s moral bulimia remained in the puke-yellow grass. Like the first time Jimmy barfed and when Clay brought paper towels it was all gone, Jimmy licking his paws.

  The chained pits, still staring.

  What are you going to do?

  The sun was still high in the sky. He hadn’t been out for long.

  He had five rounds in the Jimmies and four magazines in his pants pockets. Thirty-three rounds left, and seventeen people he’d counted climbing into the trailer. Some pounding the wall now. They would be his last kills. Then his war was finished. The massacre here, it would expose him and he deserved to die as he lived, by his own vengeance. Jimmy One would get the privilege, nasty way to send a man to the underworld.

  Sin Mountain, Clay’s self-portrait.

  His swan song.

  He fed the Hellhounds fresh magazines and went to the back of the truck.

  Then he heard tires and saw a car coming toward him. He stepped out to meet it, Jimmy One drawn. The pounding in the trailer doubled. People shouted. Through the cracked, dusty windshield, Herc met his eye.

  Clint “Herc” Walker, the cop killer, the minister. “I’m unarmed,” he said, ducking out of the Trans-Am. Eaten by disease, he looked like a dweller in darkness, not meant to stand in the sun. Eyes even pinker and more rat-like, skin like the transparent membrane of an onion.

  “You’ll want to raise your hands,” Clay said.

  Herc did.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, Herc.”

  “I recognize you. You were at the bar last night.”

  He’d gone to the house to talk to Junior again, he explained. Son thought he was just another born-again, a Bible thumper. Which he supposed he was. Finding the place empty, he drove out here, a place he swore he’d never visit.

  “I’ve heard what my son does.” Herc glanced at the chained pit bulls. “What I saw at the house was bad enough. Is he in there?” He nodded at the trailer.

  Clay shook his head.

  Herc peered past him, into the ring. Swallowed.

  He wanted to try one last time with his son before he called police, he said. Kept calling Scott, Junior’s childhood friend. Scott usually answered.

  “I don’t suppose he’s in there, either,” Herc said.

  “Try him again.”

  + + +

  Herc dialed a number.

  Wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka-wocka

  He sighed.

  “I was hoping I could save him. My son. But he didn’t want to be saved. Him, Scott, the whole gang, they were headed for a reckoning. And you gave it to them. What you’ve done here, it’s …”

  “Monstrous,” Clay mimicked Doo-Rag.

  “ … something I might have done, if I hadn’t spent my youth busting heads in bars.” Herc smiled with one side of his face, the way some men smile after crying.

  “I used to be a vindictive SOB. You may have heard I killed a man. A deputy. I was drunk that night, but I’d been fixing to kill him anyway. He stole the woman I loved.”

  Every brawl, Herc said, was practice for when he would finally kill that man. Then all that rage, all that vengefulness, caught up with him. God forgave him for what he did, but his body wouldn’t. That was God’s price, he said, giving us vessels that can’t sustain our darkest impulses.

  “God will forgive you for what you’ve done,” Herc said. “Even I can forgive you. It’s not too late for you, if you stop now. Let those people go. Kill me instead. I’m dead anyway. Take my car. Disappear. With your health, the sky’s the limit. Save yourself. Be born again. All that rage and vengefulness, it doesn’t have to kill you.”

  “Maybe, not yet,” Clay said, approaching Herc. “Still, you’ve given me an idea.”

  He pressed Jimmy One to Herc’s forehead. Kidney cancer, nasty way to send a man to the underworld.

  “Maybe not even the sky’s the limit,” Clay said.

  And pistol-whipped him unconscious.

  Herc, the born-again, saving people.

  Offering them redemption.

  Clay got in the Trans-Am. Keys were in the ignition. Rosary draped over the rearview mirror, Christ on a chain of death and rebirth. And Clay’s face in the glass—a mask of puke and gore, a mask he couldn’t take off.

  Monstrous.

  7

  Flight 1580 to Athens landed right on time.

  Dressed in the airline’s new blue uniform, Shem Steward rolled his luggage through the jet bridge into the airport terminal. He bought coffee and gummy bears and took a table in the nearest food court.


  Not that he needed caffeine, but he still enjoyed the ritual, sitting down with a cup of joe and “playing” at drinking.

  In his down time, sightseeing, Shem learned something about Greek myth.

  This ancient king of Thebes, Laius, gets rid of his baby because an oracle told him he’s going to sire a son who will kill him. Years later he’s traveling to Delphi in his chariot when he encounters a young man walking toward him at the crossroads. Young man won’t give way, so Laius tries to run him off the path. Young man gets so enraged he kills Laius. Young man turns out to be Laius’s grown-up son.

  Moral of the story: Don’t be a King Shit like Laius.

  The young man, he’s got troubles, too.

  When he gets to the crossroads, he’s already upset. The oracle tells him he’s going to kill his father and marry his mother. And because he’s a King Shit like his dad, because he won’t share the road even with a sovereign, he fulfills the prophecy and doesn’t realize it till way after.

  Moral of the story: Don’t be a King Shit like Oedipus.

  For some of you, life’s a Greek tragedy: You can’t accept how things are, but if you think you’re the one to fix them, you’re begging for a beat down.

  You’re a King Shit.

  You’re doomed.

  And doom followed Shem from city to city. Guts, Shem called him, born of horror and disgust, the shadow of the shadow of a man named Clay Haller. Shem sort of looked like Haller, only bald and mustached, his co-worker was sure he resembled someone famous but couldn’t place it. Guts knew, though, Guts who stalked Shem across oceans, who needed no food or rest. Guts, like that golem Haller became long ago.

  That day on Sin Mountain, pointing a gun at a dead man’s head, Haller saw he would take his war to the skies, where no birds soared.

  Since then the puking stopped and Shem Steward felt strong as ever. Like Guts, biding his time, studying his adversary, a creature of rage like his creator, waiting to give the King Shit a taste of his own medicine.

  Till that day of reckoning, Shem had work to do.

  That job in a bubble thirty-thousand feet in the air, a microcosm where chaos didn’t reach. Annoyances yes, but only the occasional Laius type. Like the guy in 26C, wouldn’t stop texting while they readied for takeoff. Ignored Shem’s request three times, finally said he’d stop when he finished his message and not a moment before.

  His skintight tee-shirt said, “Contents of this shirt may cause choking.” Woman next to him, staring at something across the aisle, had a dime-sized bruise on her throat.

  Sitting at the table, Shem popped a gummy bear in his mouth and watched people go by. His co-worker waved and rolled her luggage over.

  Her name was Absolut, like the vodka, like Shem’s attitude toward guys like 26C. Cocoa-skinned, big dark almond eyes, men rubbernecking when she sashayed down the aisle. His partner in coach sashayed toward him now, back from the deli with a mountain of curly fries she placed between them.

  “That’s right, you don’t eat,” she said, “except for those things.” The gummy bears. “How do you do it?”

  “I put one in my mouth. Then I chew it.”

  “Haha. I mean, how is it you never get tired or hungry?”

  “I’m just made funny.”

  While Absolut dug into her fries, Shem noticed someone watching them across the food court. Guy his size, wearing black jeans and a matching hoodie. He slunk off behind the magazine rack, and Shem knew from experience he was gone, like a shadow into a shadow, the shadow of Athens, the shadow of a chariot waiting at the crossroads.

  26C walked past, pausing mid-text to give Shem the stink eye. The woman next to him on the plane trailed after him, hauling their carry-on’s.

  Shem watched 26C go into the men’s room.

  “That jerk,” Absolut said. “The whole flight he kept looking at me like I was naked. Where are you going?”

  “Restroom,” Shem said, standing. “I have a delivery to make.”

  “Eww, Shem. Too much. You’ve just put an awful picture in my head.”

  Shem smiled with one side of his face, the way some men smile after crying.

  “Tell me about it.”

  CLEAN-UP ON AISLE 3

  BY ADAM HOWE

  _____

  Donnie sat in his beat-to-shit Pinto with the heater on full, huddling for warmth beneath the driver’s-side window that wouldn’t quite shut. An icy wind whipped through the half-inch gap, numbing his hands as he checked the .38 Special. He shoved the piece in his coat pocket, and then stared across the street at the mini mart, the neon KWIK STOP sign flashing red and blue in the night. It was the only store on the downtown strip still open this late. All the other stores had their shutters lowered, tagged with graffiti like tribal markings. Through the window he saw the scrawny Arab storekeeper perched behind the counter reading a magazine. Donnie hadn’t seen any customers since he pulled up outside. The guy was alone in there. Just him and the cash register.

  Checking his reflection in the rearview, Donnie gave a pained sigh. He looked and felt like stepped-on shit, sick with whatever bug was going around. Last thing he needed was to be pulling a job. But he was already late on this week’s vig. He didn’t pay what he owed and the flu would be the least of his problems.

  He reached across the car to pop the glove compartment, fished out his lucky ski mask. Black wool, trimmed with red around the eyes and mouth. Dusting off the mask, he yanked it down over his head and then rolled it back up in a beanie hat. Donnie honked his nose into a snot rag, stuffed the hanky in his pocket with the piece, pumped himself up with a few wheezy breaths, and then he clambered from the Pinto and started crossing the street to the KWIK STOP.

  The bell above the door tinkled as he entered. The cramped little store was divided into three narrow aisles, the shelves stockpiled like a doomsday prepper’s bunker. Loud ethnic music was playing: trumpets and drums and off-key warbling like a cat being castrated. The storekeeper glanced up from his magazine. Leathery olive skin and a gray goatee beard, his bald pate polished to a gleaming shine. He wore a white collarless shirt and a ratty old cardigan. The guy reminded Donnie of the limey actor who went blackface to play Gandhi.

  On the counter beside him a No Checks, No Credit sign was taped to the back of the register. Donnie cut a glance at the security camera above the cigarette rack. The very latest model … from the 90s. If the damn thing even worked, the playback would be a blizzard of static. It was probably just for show, to scare off amateurs.

  Not taking any chances, Donnie bowed his head and shielded his mug from the camera’s gaze as he sloped to the beer cooler opposite the counter. At the front of the store was a discount DVD bin, and a half-price arsenal of fireworks for New Years, the boxes all stacked in a pyramid like one giant rocket.

  Donnie glanced down the three aisles for customers or other employees. He didn’t see anyone. Just a lonely-looking mop and bucket in Aisle 2. The storekeeper was clearly no neat freak; the shelves were dusty, the goods caked in grime. The place could’ve used a good airing. It reeked worse than Donnie’s fleapit apartment, and that was smelling something. At the back of the store was the liquor display, a few ragged cobwebs clinging to the bottles, and a steel door marked STAFF ONLY. Donnie couldn’t hear anything behind the door, but it was hard to tell over the blaring music. Maybe the storekeeper lived back there with his wife and their litter of kids? The hell with it. He’d be gone before anyone even knew it.

  With his back to the storekeeper, Donnie tugged his lucky ski mask down over his face and then reeled towards the counter, whipping the .38 from his pocket.

  “Okay, asshole!” he shouted above the music. “You know what this is!”

  The storekeeper glanced up from his magazine as if Donnie had only asked him to price check an item. Seeing the revolver in Donnie’s fist, the man’s dark eyes narrowed. He rose slowly from his stool, raising his hands. Unlike Donnie’s they were steady as a rock. The guy looked so calm, Donnie wondered if
he even spoke English.

  Then he said, with a heavy accent: “Oh yes, my friend, I know what this is.”

  “Just open the register and gimme the money, you won’t get hurt.”

  The storekeeper gave a curt nod, well versed in armed robbery etiquette.

  Lowering one hand, he reached slowly towards the cash register and pressed a button—

  And suddenly he wasn’t there.

  Donnie blinked in surprise.

  The fucking guy just disappeared.

  Peering over the counter, Donnie saw a trapdoor—the door still swinging where the storekeeper had dropped down into the basement onto a mattress. Splayed out on his back, the man glared up at Donnie with a hateful grin. Then he slashed a finger across his throat, before rolling off the mattress and out of sight.

  “The fuck?” Donnie muttered—

  And then steel shutters crashed down over the front door and window. The power went out, the store went black, and the music and even the hum of the refrigerators shut off, entombing the place in sudden silence.

  It took a moment for Donnie’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. He rolled his ski mask back up into a beanie. Stood gaping at the shutters in disbelief.

  He’d never seen shutters inside a store before. He banged his fist against the shutters—thick steel, like the treads of a tank. Donnie lashed out with his boot until his knee buckled, and he hobbled back in pain. Feeling his skin crawl, he glanced up at the winking red eye of the security camera above the cigarette rack, shuddering as he pictured the storekeeper silently watching him.

  He scurried behind the counter, ignoring the register, the cash now forgotten. Careful not to fall through the open trap, Donnie searched beneath the counter for a button or something to raise the shutters. What the hell had the storekeeper pressed to drop the trapdoor? Donnie couldn’t even find a panic button. And now that he thought of it, why wasn’t any alarm sounding?

  Crouching warily above the open trap, he peered down into the dingy basement. All he could see was the mattress where the storekeeper had landed. “Hey!” Donnie shouted down, panic in his voice. “Open these fucking shutters!”