The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  The window was down. The hand came out. It started to hatch its own bird, then stopped. The driver had just realized the hand that had given him the finger wasn’t empty. It was curled around something. Vince didn’t give him time to think about it, and he never saw the trucker’s face. All he saw was the tattoo, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. A good thought, and how often did you get a chance to give someone exactly what they wanted?

  Vince caught the ring in his teeth, pulled it, heard the fizz of some chemical reaction starting, and tossed Little Boy in through the window. It didn’t have to be a fancy half-court shot, not even a lousy pull-up jumper. Just a lob. He was a magician, opening his hands to set free a dove where a moment before there had been a wadded-up handkerchief.

  Now you take me out, Vince thought. Let’s finish this thing right.

  But the truck swerved away from him. Vince was sure it would have come swerving back, if there had been time. That swerve was only reflex, Laughlin trying to get away from a thrown object. But it was enough to save his life, because Little Boy did its thing before the driver could course-correct and drive Vince Adamson off the road.

  The cab lit up in a vast white flash, as if God himself had bent down to take a snapshot. Instead of swerving back to the left, LAUGHLIN veered away to the right, first back into the lane of Route 6 bound for Show Low, then beyond. The tractor flayed the guardrail on the right-hand side of the road, striking up a sheet of copper sparks, a shower of fire, a thousand Catherine wheels going off at once. Vince thought madly of July 4th, Race a child again and sitting in his lap to watch the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air; sky-flares shining in his child’s delighted, inky eyes.

  Then the truck crunched through the guardrail, shredding it as if it were tinfoil. LAUGHLIN nosed over a twenty-foot embankment, into a ravine filled with sand and tumbleweeds. The wheels caught. The truck slued. The big tanker rammed forwards into the back of the cab. Vince had shot beyond that point before he could brake to a stop, but Lemmy saw it all: saw the cab and the tanker form a “V” and then split apart; saw the tanker roll first and the cab a second or two after; saw the tanker burst open and then blow. It went up in a fireball and a greasy pillar of black smoke. The cab rolled past it, over and over, the cube shape turning into a senseless crumple of maroon that sparked hot shards of sun where bare metal had split out in prongs and hooks.

  It landed with the driver’s window up to the sky, about eighty feet away from the pillar of fire that had been its cargo. By then Vince was running back along his own skid-mark. He saw the figure that tried to pull itself through the misshapen window. The face turned towards him, except there was no face, only a mask of blood. The driver emerged to the waist before collapsing back inside. One tanned arm – the one with the tattoo – stuck up like a submarine’s periscope. The hand dangled limp on the wrist.

  Vince stopped at Lemmy’s bike, gasping for breath. For a moment he thought he was going to pass out, but he leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and presently felt a little better.

  “You got him, Cap.” Lemmy’s voice was hoarse with emotion.

  “We better make sure,” Vince said. Although the stiff periscope arm and the hand dangling limp at the end of it suggested that would just be a formality.

  “Why not?” Lemmy said. “I gotta take a piss, anyway.”

  “You’re not pissing on him, dead or alive,” Vince said.

  There was an approaching roar: Race’s Harley. He pulled up in a showy skid stop, killed the engine, and got off. His face, although dusty, glowed with delight and triumph. Vince hadn’t seen Race look that way since the kid was twelve. He had won a dirt-track race in a quarter-midget Vince had built for him, a yellow torpedo with a souped-up Briggs & Stratton engine. Race had come leaping from the cockpit with that exact same expression on his face, right after taking the chequered flag.

  He threw his arms around Vince and hugged him. “You did it! You did it, Dad! You cooked his fucking ass!”

  For a moment Vince allowed the hug. Because it had been so long. And because this was his spoiled son’s better angel. Everybody had one; even at his age, and after all he had seen, Vince believed that. So for a moment he allowed the hug, and relished the warmth of his son’s body, and promised himself he would remember it.

  Then he put his hands against Race’s chest and pushed him away. Hard. Race stumbled backwards on his custom snakeskin boots, the expression of love and triumph fading—

  No, not fading. Merging. Becoming the look Vince had come to know so well: distrust and dislike. Quit, why don’t you? That’s not dislike and never was.

  No, not dislike. Hate, bright and glowing.

  All squared away, sir, and fuck you.

  “What was her name?” Vince asked.

  “What?”

  “Her name, John.” He hadn’t called Race by his actual name in years, and there was no one to hear it now but them. Lemmy was sliding down the soft earth of the embankment, towards the crushed metal ball that had been LAUGHLIN’s cab, letting them have this tender father-son moment in privacy.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Pure scorn. But when Vince reached out and tore off those fucking mirror shades, he saw the truth in John “Race” Adamson’s eyes. He knew what this was about. Vince was coming in five-by, as they used to say in Nam. Did they still say that in Iraq, he wondered, or had it gone the way of Morse Code?

  “What do you want to do now, John? Go on to Show Low? Roust Clarke’s sister for money that isn’t there?”

  “It could be there.” Sulking now. He gathered himself. “It is there. I know Clarke. He trusted that whore.”

  “And The Tribe? Just . . . what? Forget them? Dean and Ellis and all the others? Doc?”

  “They’re dead.” He eyed his father. “Too slow. And most of them too old.” You too, the cool eyes said.

  Lemmy was on his way back, his boots puffing up dust. He had something in his hand.

  “What was her name?” Vince repeated. “Clarke’s girlfriend. What was her name?”

  “Fuck’s it matter?” He paused then, struggling to win Vince back, his expression coming as close as it ever did to pleading. “Jesus. Leave it, why don’t you? We won. We showed him.”

  “You knew Clarke. Knew him in Fallujah, knew him back here in The World. You were tight. If you knew him, you knew her. What was her name?”

  “Janey. Joanie. Something like that.”

  Vince slapped him. Race blinked, startled. Dropped for a moment back to ten years old. But just for a moment. In another instant the hating look was back; a sick, curdled glare.

  “He heard us talking back there in that diner parking lot. The trucker,” Vince said. Patiently. As if speaking to the child this young man had once been. The young man he had risked his life to save. Ah, but that had been instinct, and he wouldn’t have changed it. It was the one good thing in all this horror. This filth. Not that he had been the only one operating on filial instinct. “He knew he couldn’t take us there, but he couldn’t let us go, either. So he waited. Bided his time. Let us get ahead of him.”

  “I have no clue what you’re talking about!” Very forceful. Only he was lying, and they both knew it.

  “He knew the road and went after us where the terrain favoured him. Like any good soldier.”

  Yes. And then had pursued them with a single-minded purpose, regardless of the almost certain cost to himself. Laughlin had settled on death before dishonour. Vince knew nothing about him, but felt suddenly that he liked him better than his own son. Such a thing should not have been possible, but there it was.

  “You’re fucked in the head,” Race said.

  “I don’t think so. For all we know, he was going to see her when we crossed his path at the diner. It’s what a father might do for a kid he loved. Arrange things so he could look in, every now and then. See if she might even want a ride out. Take a chance on something besides the pipe and the rock.”

  Lemmy rejoined them. “Dead,” he sai
d.

  Vince nodded.

  “This was on the visor.” He handed it to Vince. Vince didn’t want to look at it, but he did. It was a snapshot of a smiling girl with her hair in a ponytail. She wore a CORMAN HIGH VARSITY sweatshirt, the same one she had died in. She was sitting on the front bumper of LAUGHLIN, her back resting against the silver grill. She was wearing her daddy’s camo cap turned around backwards and mock-saluting and struggling not to grin. Saluting who? Laughlin himself, of course. Laughlin had been holding the camera.

  “Her name was Jackie Laughlin,” Race said. “And she’s dead, too, so fuck her.”

  Lemmy started forwards, ready to pull Race off his bike and feed him his teeth, but Vince held him back with a look. Then he shifted his gaze back to his boy.

  “Ride on, son,” he said. “Keep the shiny side up.”

  Race looked at him, not understanding.

  “But don’t stop in Show Low, because I intend to let the cops know a certain little whore might need protection. I’ll tell them some nut killed her brother, and she might be next.”

  “And what are you going to tell them when they ask how you happened to come by that information?”

  “Everything,” Vince said, his voice calm. Serene even. “Better get moving. Ride on. It’s what you do best. Keeping ahead of that truck on the Cumba road . . . that was something. I’ll give you that. You got a gift for hightailing it. Not much else, but you got that. So hightail your ass out of here.”

  Race looked at him, unsure and suddenly frightened. But that wouldn’t last. He’d get his fuck-you back. It was all he had: some fuck-you attitude, a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and a fast bike.

  “Dad—”

  “Better go on, son,” Lemmy said. “Someone will have seen that smoke by now. There’ll be Staties here soon.”

  Race smiled. When he did, a single tear spilled from his left eye and cut a track through the dust on his face. “Just a couple of old chickenshits,” he said.

  He went back to his bike. The chains across the insteps of his snakeskin boots jingled . . . a little foolishly, Vince thought.

  Race swung his leg over the seat, started his Harley, and drove away west, toward Show Low. Vince did not expect him to look back and was not disappointed.

  They watched him. After a while, Lemmy said: “You want to go, Cap?”

  “No place to go, man. I think I might just sit here for a bit, side of the road.”

  “Well,” Lemmy said. “If you want. I guess I could sit some myself.”

  They went to the side of the road and sat down cross-legged like old Indians with no blankets to sell and watched the tanker burn in the desert, piling black oil-smoke into the blue, unforgiving sky. Some of it drifted back their way, reeking and greasy.

  “We can move,” Vince said. “If you don’t like the smell.”

  Lemmy tipped his head back and inhaled deeply, like a man considering the bouquet of a pricey wine.

  “No, I don’t mind it. Smells like Vietnam.”

  Vince nodded.

  “Makes me think of them old days,” Lemmy said. “When we were almost as fast as we believed we were.”

  Vince nodded again. “Live pretty—”

  “Yep. Or die laughin’.”

  They said nothing more after that, just sat there, waiting, Vince with the girl’s picture in his hand. Every once in a while, he glanced at it, turning it in the sun, considering how young she looked, and how happy.

  But mostly he watched the fire.

  BARBARA RODEN

  Out and Back

  BARBARA RODEN IS A World Fantasy Award-winning editor and publisher (for Ash-Tree Press), whose short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Nineteenth Annual Collection, Horror: Best of the Year 2005, Bound for Evil, Strange Tales 2, Gaslight Grimoire and Gaslight Grotesque, and Poe. Her first collection, Northwest Passages, was published by Prime Books in October 2009.

  “My cousin-by-marriage Sean Lavery, knowing my love for weird and outré websites, sent me a link to the Dark Roasted Blend site (www.darkroastedblend.com),” reveals the author, “where I found several pages featuring photographs of abandoned places.

  “My imagination was fired by pictures taken at Chippewa Lake Park in Medina, Ohio, which opened in 1878 and was abandoned in 1978, with the buildings and rides left to rot where they stood, and I began looking around for some information about the park.

  “I’ve always had a fondness for amusement parks, ever since I was a child visiting Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition with my father and my brother: an annual trip which was one of the red-letter days on my childhood calendar. The photographs of Chippewa Lake Park were equal parts eerie and sad, for anyone who has ever thrilled to the sights and sounds of a midway, and the story sprang, almost fully-formed, into my head; one of the few times that’s happened.”

  To see some of the pictures that inspired the following story, visit: www.defunctparks.com/parks/OH/ChippewaLake/chippewa-lake.htm.

  “KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. I don’t want to miss it.”

  “How hard can it be to miss?” Linda asked, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s not the sort of thing you’re going to drive past and not see.”

  “It’s been abandoned for a long time,” said Allan patiently. “It’s not like there are going to be signs. Besides,” - he waved one hand at the dispirited housing development they were driving through – “the place has grown up a lot. Back when it was built it was a long way from anywhere; nothing but scrub and fields.”

  “So why’d anyone build an amusement park miles from where people lived?” Linda wasn’t particularly interested in the answer, but it had been a long drive, and she was tired of the silence; tired, full stop.

  Allan shrugged. “I dunno. Guess land was cheap. And there’s a lake; that’s what it was named after. Must’ve been a popular spot for people to come with their families.”

  “What are you expecting to see?”

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t been able to find out much. It’s kind of off the beaten track” – Linda gave a hollow laugh, as if to say You’re kidding me – “and not too many people seem to have been here. I’m hoping to get some good pictures; put them up on my website.”

  “Great.” Linda stared out the window. “We take a day out of our vacation just so you can maybe get some pictures of you’re not sure what – if it’s still there, and if we find it – and then you’ll spend hours putting them up on a website for three people to see. Hooray.”

  Allan glanced sideways at her. “Hey, it’s just one day. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Well, you got it wrong then. It’s one day out of the vacation I’ve been looking forward to for months, thinking – stupid me – that we’d have a nice relaxing time, no chasing around like we do every weekend, me being dragged off to some abandoned place or weird site that you just have to see. All I want is a rest, Allan.”

  “You didn’t have to come, you know. You could have stayed back at the hotel.”

  “Yeah, I guess I could. While you took the car, I could’ve stayed in the hotel room, and then when I got bored I could’ve gone down to the pool, and then I could’ve gone back to the room. Thrilling. Holidays are supposed to be about doing things together.”

  Allan shook his head. There was no point arguing with her when she got like this. When he’d realized their trip would take them so close – well, within a hundred miles or so – to White Lake Park he’d planned to visit it; he just hadn’t mentioned it to Linda until that morning. He’d honestly thought that the idea of visiting another abandoned amusement park would appeal to her as much as it did to him. It wasn’t every day you got a chance to see something like this. He was trying to figure out a way to say that without provoking her further when he glanced to his left and saw something that made him start, so that the car swerved and Linda uttered a startled “Hey!”

  “Look! Over there! Do you see it?” Al
lan slowed the car to a crawl. “There!”

  Linda craned her neck and peered through the driver’s window. Behind the tired, sagging houses that lined the road she could see the tops of trees, an unbroken line stretching in both directions and apparently away from the houses as well. For a few moments that was all she could see, and she was about to ask what he was looking at when she saw it too.

  It came into focus so suddenly that she almost jerked her head back in surprise. One moment she was looking at an innocuous treescape, leafy green boughs of maples and oaks and buckeyes fluttering in the breeze, and the next she could see, twisting its way through the branches, the unmistakable silhouette of a roller coaster track, wooden supports criss-crossing beneath. Her eye followed the track and she saw it dip out of sight behind the houses; then, further ahead, it rose again, and she had an impression as of some huge beast crouched behind the houses, watching, waiting. She shook her head and blinked, and despite the heat of the day she shivered.

  Allan had pulled onto the shoulder and stopped the car. “There must be a way in,” he muttered. “Some sort of entrance . . .”

  “Long gone, I’ll bet,” said Linda. “Place is probably locked up tighter than a drum. Can you imagine the lawsuits?”

  Allan didn’t hear; or at least pretended not to. “There’s got to be access from behind these houses. They back right on to it.”

  “What are you going to do? Walk through someone’s back yard, climb their fence? Honestly, Allan . . .”

  “There.” He pointed to a house that stood slightly apart from its neighbours. It was a good deal older than most of the other houses in the area, sitting in the middle of an unkempt lawn choked with dandelions, a battered wooden fence which had once been white standing guard in front like a mouthful of broken teeth. To one side was a dusty laneway with a half-dozen cars parked in it, and Allan looked at them with suspicion.