The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

  As we walked beneath the Imperial Highway overpass we came to the confluence of L.A.’s two dry rivers. Vibiana stopped again and gestured with a broad sweep of her hand.

  “Sees for yourself.”

  Flaming barrels were set in a circle at the point of the Vee where the concrete rivers met. Howling figures on all fours darted between the barrels, little more than small silhouettes against the lapping orange flames. Their movements seemed choreographed and formal as they raced across the circle, occasionally butting heads or nipping each other’s hind quarters. The howls were interspersed with tiny yips as one or another of the Hounds bit a little too deeply into another’s flank. One of the dozen or so creatures, I noted, didn’t get involved in the ritual, but sat outside the circle in the darkness, visible only by the reflected glow of the fires in its red eyes. It watched.

  One of the Hounds sneezed loudly then and another – quite clearly, in a discernible English accent – said: “Bless you.”

  “What the . . .?” I muttered.

  The Hounds were all people, I saw as we got closer and the silhouettes took on dimension in the firelight. Naked people. Naked men to be precise, running around on their hands and legs like dogs. Most of them had fur – glued on? – while they all had clearly had surgical alterations to their bodies, especially their faces. I saw a lot of extended canines and pug noses, and most had had their ears modified. Some had triangular German Shepherd ears, while a few had floppy beagle ears. Every one of them displayed a tail of one sort or another, but it wasn’t bright enough to tell if these too were surgical modifications or mere decoration. As we approached them, one of the Hounds – its black patches suggested an attempt at Dalmatian, though Walt Disney would have defrosted himself before accepting the mutt as number 102 – suddenly started chasing his tail. I looked away as he futilely attempted to lick his own dangling balls.

  “Oh, lord,” I said, “I bet you don’t see stuff like this on the Mississippi.”

  The Hounds had spotted us now and formed themselves into a loose pack. The one beast still sat outside the circle of flames, eyes flashing in the darkness. The others were inching up on us, snarling and growling and pawing the ground. It should have been impossible to take this bunch of naked jerks seriously, but suddenly they looked like what they were pretending to be: a pack of feral dogs. I could sense Vibiana’s fear as she froze in position, her hands clutching the handle of the shopping cart. The Hounds had very quickly and slickly cut us off from any avenue of retreat.

  “Better gets ready and does what you need to do,” Vibiana whispered to me. “Them teeths is sharp.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got any more turkey legs on you?” I asked.

  It was a purely rhetorical question.

  The snarling of the Hounds ceased and I saw one of the German Shepherd guys get ready to spring. He’d had his nose extended into a kind of hairy snout. What self-respecting plastic surgeon would do such work? (But then, who would do what had been done to Joan Rivers?) The Hound was sculpted muscle beneath his fake fur and those sharpened teeth looked like they could tear your throat out. I desperately looked around for a way to defend myself and saw nothing.

  This was not how I ever expected to check out.

  I saw the Hound’s tensed muscles flex, readied myself to bring an elbow around at the last minute to drive into that false snout and hope for the best when a gravelly voice called out.

  “Marty? Marty Burns?”

  It would be an understatement to suggest that I was taken by surprise. But then, so were the other pooches. They turned and looked back at an especially beagle-ish Hound ambling up from the rear of the pack. He came right up to me and sniffed at my leg, then buried his nose in my crotch and took another deep whiff.

  “It is you!” he growled.

  He sat back on his haunches and offered up a paw. I mean hand, of course. His tongue was lolling out of his mouth in a big dopey grin, but after a few seconds of study of his considerably augmented face, I recognized the man underneath all the body modification.

  “Guy?” I tried. “Guy Bradley?”

  “Woof,” he barked.

  We shook. Then he licked the back of my hand and wagged his tail.

  The rest of the Hounds returned to the circle and went on with their ritual.

  “I knews you was the right choice,” Vibiana said and slapped me on the back. Then she grinned up at the moon and whispered to the ancient satellite: “Thank ye, old gal.”

  “So,” I said to the Hound, “how’s tricks?”

  VIII

  You remember Guy Bradley. Really. Even if you don’t recognize his name.

  Guy probably wore more polyester suits and wide ties than any man in the history of television. For a period of about five years, Guy was the bad guy at least once in every detective show on the air. He had puffed-up Seventies hair, a thick black Village People moustache and an oversized pinky ring. Or tinted aviator glasses. Or both. And always one of those awful suits and ties. (I think those ties were made illegal in 1981.) Guy was never a regular on any of those shows, but was buds with a couple of big network casting directors (one was his sister-in-law) and so he always had work. Banacek, Madigan, Banyon, Quincy – they all nailed Guy, some of them more than once. And usually at the end of a chase scene involving one of those boxy American cars that eventually slammed into a telephone pole. The dazed dude in the shiny suit who staggered out the door and into the handcuffs? That was Guy. At least, when it wasn’t Bradford Dillman.

  NBC even gave him a shot at his own series back in 1978. They shot a pilot called Brannigan, Again. I don’t know what it was supposed to mean, either, or why the hell that comma was in the title, but I was in it, too. That’s how we met. We were both on the sauce at the time and made some merry hell together. We had a great time on the shoot and palled around pretty close for a few months after.

  The pilot never so much as made it to air.

  Our friendship waned – it was purely a relationship born of fermentation – and I’d seen Guy around town a few times in the intervening years, even on the tube twice or thrice, but probably not for a decade that I could recall. That’s a lot of water down the L.A. River.

  “So, uh, how you been, Guy?” I asked.

  He cocked his head and howled up at the moon. Vibiana nodded approvingly.

  “Grrr-r-r-reat,” he said.

  “That’s good. That’s nice.”

  “I’m a Hound now,” he told me.

  “Yes, so I see. How’s that working out for you, then?”

  “You haven’t met a Hound before, have you?”

  “No, I can’t say that I have.” I glanced at the dead girl in the cart and crazed Vibiana standing over her. “But then this is turning out to be a cherry-popper of a night for me. A kindergarten to Ph.D. learning experience.”

  “We’re trans-specied,” he said. Then he lolled his tongue out and panted.

  “Ahhh, no kidding?”

  “It’s being acknowledged more and more. Why should the transgendered and intersexed get acknowledged and not us? I mean, is that fair?”

  “Not fair at all.” Intersexed?

  “It’s the greatest goddamn thing in the world, Marty. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Kicks Scientology in the fucking ass. It’s a whole new life.”

  “A dog’s life,” I said.

  “Don’t knock it, Marty, not till you’ve tried it. What’s so bad about a dog’s life, huh? You eat what you want, when you want. You sleep when you feel like it and you piss and shit where you please. No agents, no casting directors, no ex-wives or bankruptcy lawyers or bailiffs. No television fucking producers. Grrrrr.”

  “A little light on the creature comforts, though, isn’t?” I asked. Then added: “You should pardon the expression.”

  “There’s more to life than designer shoes and fast cars, Marty.”

  Guy gave a little flick of his head to indicate that I should bend down so he could whisper in my
ear. I squatted down beside him and he pressed his muzzle against the side of my head. His nose was cold. I think that’s a good sign.

  “The sex is unbelievable,” he told me.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Arf, baby. I mean, I always had a yen for doggy-style, but you ain’t lived until you’ve had a bitch in heat with your pack. That’s what tonight is all about.”

  “You’re not going to hump my leg or anything are you, Guy?”

  He shook his head like he had a rag between his teeth. “She’s over there,” he whispered.

  I looked back to where he was pointing, at the figure still outside the main circle of barrels. I could see now that it was a woman who was curled up there. She looked furry, too, and as naked as the other Hounds. She briefly padded out into the circle and turned around, displaying her hairy rear. The Hounds went wild.

  “This is all for her,” Guy told me. “The males play the challenge to see who gets first rights on the bitch. But . . .” he raised his head and sniffed at the air in the direction of the woman “. . . she’s so hot tonight, we’ll all get our chance. Can’t you smell her?”

  And he howled again.

  “Guy?” I whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “This woman I’m with: Vibiana. Do you know her?”

  He growled slightly. “She’s not a Hound.”

  “Yeah, I guessed that. What do you know about her?”

  “She and the other one come through here every month.”

  “The other one?” I asked.

  “In the cart. The dead one.”

  “Annie?”

  “I don’t know her name. She’s always dead when they pass this way. We’re not so crazy about them, tell you the truth.”

  “What do mean she’s always dead? When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I told you: last month. Always round the full moon. It’s the time of the heat, so I remember.”

  “That can’t be,” I said. “She was alive just a few hours ago. I. . . .”

  I realized that everything had gone quiet around us and looked up. The Hounds had assembled in two lines and the bitch was walking on all fours between them. She had long red hair, like a setter’s, that covered most of her body. She moved with an easy grace and as she looked toward me I saw that the glint in her eyes wasn’t natural: she wore – or had implanted – spooky contact lenses. The breeze kicked up behind her as she sidled toward us and for a moment I swore I could smell her heat. Vibiana muttered behind me.

  “You were not to pass this way again,” the female Hound hissed at Vibiana. “You were warned.”

  “I does as I must,” Vibiana replied. She pointed at me. “I comes with him.” She gestured at Annie in the cart. “I does it for her.”

  The bitch growled from deep in her chest and the other Hounds echoed the menacing cry. Then she came up beside Guy and rubbed flanks with him. I saw him . . . stir. He instinctively began to move behind her and wrap his arms around her, but she turned her neck and nipped at him and with a yowl he bounded away. More cautiously he padded back over beside me and sat on his haunches. I could still see his tumescent doghood dangling.

  “Marty,” he growled, “this is Lucky. Lucky, my old pal Marty Burns.”

  Lucky the bitch slunk up to me and sniffed. I held my hand out, palm up. She rested her chin on it and I gave her a little scratch behind the ear. A couple of the Hounds snarled in the night, but I stood my ground. Not only did Lucky have body length red hair flowing from her scalp, she was covered in wine red fur. I don’t know if it was a costume or what, but it looked real. Her exposed breasts were furry too, expect for the nipples, big and hard in the night breeze.

  “How you doing?” I said.

  She rolled onto her back and raised her arms and legs in the air.

  “She likes to have her stomach scratched,” Guy whispered.

  When in Rome . . .

  Her right leg started to twitch as I ran my fingers up and down the soft fur of her belly, and her leg spasmed faster the harder I scratched. I carefully avoided getting too close to any conceivable erogenous zone, though under the circumstances I couldn’t be sure what that might mean. I don’t know what the deal with this bitch was, but her fur sure felt real to me. Kind of nice, too.

  All of a sudden, Lucky rolled over and bolted to her feet. She shook herself from head to tail – it was long, red and bushy – as if she’d just jumped out of a bath or a lake. Then she ran back into the middle of the circle of baying Hounds. They were all visibly . . . excited. Lucky stretched languorously, displaying herself for all the pack to see. A guy working on some kind of Jack Russell thing clearly couldn’t wait another second and tried to mount her from behind. She kicked out at him and caught him square in the Snoopies. He yipped his way back into the pack. Then Lucky stood up on her hind legs . . . I mean, stood up and pointed at us.

  “You may pass this moon, Vibiana of Los Angeles. You may pass because he is with you.”

  She meant me.

  “But do not cross the Hondo again. Next moon will not find me so forgiving.”

  “Next moon, Goddess willing, I won’t has to pass this way. I’m counting on him, too. For an end to the journeys.”

  “That is not my concern. The heat is upon me and the night is too short.”

  The pack drew in toward Lucky. I didn’t particularly care to watch what was going to happen next as Lucky dropped back down to all fours. She stood up again, though, and gestured at Guy.

  “You will accompany them, Boner,” she said. “See to their safe passage.”

  “Awwww, hell,” Guy moaned. He rapidly (and thankfully from my point of view) de-tumesced. I suppose I could understand his disappointment what with the full moon only coming once a month. Still, my average isn’t always that good.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I whispered to Vibiana.

  “I concurs,” she said.

  “Awroof,” Guy said. A little unenthusiastically, I thought.

  Vibiana pushed the trolley and Guy and I followed. I didn’t look back when the furious sounds of yowls and squeals (and one high-pitched “Yes, yes, yes!”) commenced, but Guy wistfully craned his head and whimpered over what he was leaving behind.

  “Boner?” I asked.

  “It’s a long story,” was all he would say on the matter.

  We journeyed on upstream.

  IX

  By my reckoning, we passed through Cudahy and Bell Gardens and most of Vernon uneventfully. Vibiana continued to lead the way, pushing the cart in front of her. Guy – I couldn’t quite bring myself to call him Boner – trotted along beside me, occasionally dashing off to lift his leg against one of the concrete walls. I thought he might give up the routine once he was out of sight of his fellow . . . mongrels, but he insisted on running on all fours, sniffing the ground and doing the kinds of things that dogs are wont to do. The truth is that after a while, I started thinking of him as a real dog and at one point, after he chased away a nasty looking coon cat which hissed at us from the ruins of a packing crate on the dry river bed, I actually patted him on top of the head and offered up a “good boy.”

  Vibiana laughed.

  We started to see more people navigating the river as we neared downtown. There were homeless men and women curled up in their boxes under the bridges, and winos drinking their T-bird and Night Train, and kids, some in gang colours – and in skin of all colours – fucking with or just plain fucking each other as a way to pass the dark, lonely hours of the night. We ignored all of them, and they ignored us.

  A thin trickle of water, no wider than my hand, could be seen running down the very centre of the river as we neared the 1st Street overpass. Guy ran over to it and sniffed the water, then flicked at it tentatively with his tongue. He yelped his dismay at the taste and ran around in circles. Vibiana crouched down and kept scrambling around as well. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing, until I saw that she was searching for a position from which she c
ould see the full moon’s reflection in the tiny stream. She passed her hands over the water several times and muttered under her breath. Then she pulled a straight razor from her shoe and sliced the tip of her finger with its edge. That brought another loud yip from Guy who ran and hid behind my legs. I patted the back of his head to calm him down while Vibiana squeezed drops of her blood into the water and studied the patterns they made in the image of the moon’s face. She nodded her head approvingly and stood up.

  “Good omens, Medicine Man,” she said. She ignored the blood that continued to drip from her finger. “Our girl is definitely abouts tonight.”

  “Which girl is that?” I said.

  “Toypurina, fool!” she said. “We gots to get off the river, though.”

  Guy shook his head furiously. “Never get out of the fucking boat,” he barked.

  “Stairs up that way,” she said, pointing. “Takes us where we wants to get.”

  I looked over at the steep set of zig-zagging steps cut into the side of the culvert. The river bed was set very deep in this part of downtown L.A. and it was a long walk up. I glanced at the cart with the dead girl in it, then back at the steps.

  “What do we do about Annie?” I asked.

  Vibiana flashed her broken teeth at me. A tiny red gem had been inset into a back molar and it shone like a weird evil eye in the moonlight. A prescient shiver ran through me.

  “Heads or feets?” she asked, cackling.

  I chose feet. (Wouldn’t you?)

  Vibiana must have been remarkably strong, because she was stuck with the harder job of walking backward up the stairs carrying the bulk of Annie’s literally dead weight. Guy was no help at all, particularly because he insisted on stopping to pee a drop or two on what seemed like every fifth step. I would have been deeply annoyed but for marvelling at his bladder control.

  A glow emanated from a ten-foot landing set into the wall about halfway up the climb and as we approached it I braced myself for trouble when I saw half-a-dozen Chicano teens in gang colours crouched in a circle on the concrete. They watched us carefully as we squeezed past them, but none of them so much as made a move for the guns they all had tucked into their waistbands idiot-style. As we climbed up the next flight of steps, I glanced back and saw that what I assumed to be a drug-deal or gang rape in process was actually an intense-looking game of Risk.