Evil Jester Digest, Vol.2

by Peter Giglio (Editor)

  Lying on the wood floor is a faded cardboard cigar box. Inside is a cheap plastic glow-in-the dark crucifix.

  After a bit Max wipes his eyes and swallows. He gathers the box, shuts the closet, and sleepwalks back to his widower’s bed to wait for daylight, the smell of the sea and the song of sparrows.

  For Linda

  When I was gathering the stories for this anthology, the brilliant Trent Zelazny gave me two options, and wouldn’t you know it, I loved ’em both! But I had established rules for the EJD series. No authors were to reappear in consecutive volumes. Hell, how could I justify having the same author show up twice in the same volume?

  Easy, I realized. I’m the editor, and the rule was mine to begin with. I don’t have to justify a damned thing. Rules are meant to be broken, and if Trent has his way, my rules aren’t the only things that will be broken by the time you finish reading this story.

  So here we are, with a double-down dose of TZ, who, quite frankly, I just can’t get enough of. If you like quality dark fiction—and I think you must if you’re still with us—you need to check out all of Trent’s books. Stat.

  Anyone who has been in a terrible car accident will immediately appreciate the authenticity of this gloomy number.

  But there’s more; there always is with Trent.

  Windows in the Wreckage

  Trent Zelazny

  The car screamed as it went over the hill, and went on screaming as it went up on two wheels and then toppled over, then over and over, down the hillside, smashing against trees and rocks. Tornadoes of dust swirled. For a moment he thought his head had been ripped off. Then he was rolling over, over and over again. His seatbelt kept him strapped in. Fiberglass splintered and safety glass shattered. The car rolled and kept rolling until it finally had enough. It rocked and teetered on its side, then came down hard and settled upright on its four wheels.

  Smoke hissed. His eyes were closed. He didn’t think he could open them, so he just listened to the hissing sound, vaguely aware of the blood and dirt in his mouth. He knew that his body hurt, though had no idea how much it might hurt. All he knew was that it still felt like he was rolling. Some invisible entity had injected cement into his veins but his mind was still rolling. And so he listened. Some small rocks were still tumbling, and the smoke hissed, and then he was asleep.

  ***

  Cut it out!

  His eyes opened. They didn’t really want to open, but they did all the same. He saw his lap and the number nine on his stomach. A blunt scythe hovered across between his head and his lap. He blinked several times and each flutter scraped his corneas. The dull scythe blade became the lower part of a steering wheel, and the number nine, he realized, was actually the number six, upside down.

  He tried to lift his head, raised it about an inch. It was like a bowling ball dangling from strained muscle and tissue. A shuddering, uneven breath came out in a wheeze as he let his head back down. He breathed through his mouth; he couldn’t breathe through his nose.

  The hissing had stopped. All the rocks had tumbled. The only sound was a surreal discord of reverberating birdcalls. He couldn’t tell how close or far away they were. All he knew for certain was that it was sometime during the day. Daylight splashed on his lap and his shirt, on the wheel and his hands. Bloody hands, scratched and nicked, a faceless watch strapped to his wrist. He shifted his eyes left.

  The door was crushed in toward him. The window had no glass. The door panel was snapped into three or four pieces. He saw bits of plastic covering mechanical things.

  His arms worked better than his neck. He lifted his hand and touched what remained of the inside handle. He pulled it and nothing happened. He let his hand drop back into his lap, and when he did his eyelids dropped back over his eyes and blackness dropped over his mind.

  ***

  It looked like late afternoon when next his eyes opened. The upside down six was still on his belly. The face of his watch was still gone. The numbness in his body was fading, being slowly replaced with aches and pains and stings and spasms.

  Still weak, he’d regained enough strength to lift his head, and when he did he saw through where the windshield had been. Saw the car’s crushed white hood, and beyond it trees and dirt and rock and generic, miscellaneous shrubbery. The rearview mirror was cracked, but it was still there, and in it he saw much of the same behind him, only roughed up a little more. He saw the base of the hill in it. Then, to his right, from the corner of his eye, he saw plaid, red and black and white.

  There was a woman in the seat beside him. She leaned against her door, arm dangling out the window, head crooked into her shoulder and leaning against the shoulder strap of her seatbelt. Her messy hair was a faded blonde. Her eyes were a blue that had probably been sapphire but were now lifeless sky blue orbs that stared at nothing. Her face was pale and streaked in red and black. Dribbles of blood, mostly dry now, cascaded from her mouth and other parts of her head. She wore a red flannel shirt and jeans. He didn’t recognize her, but recognizing her wouldn’t have done her any good. Either way, she was dead.

  He turned his head as much as he could and looked in the backseat. There was no one there. He looked back at the woman. She was still dead.

  Though aches and pain were setting in, they were at a distance. He lifted a hand to his nose. It felt much bigger than he thought his nose should be. He angled the rearview mirror and looked at himself. His nose was broken; or the nose he saw was broken. He didn’t recognize the face looking back at him. There was vague familiarity in it, but nothing concrete. There was blood on the face, too. Lacerations, abrasions, and dirt; the face looked like it had been mauled by a dog.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He was thirsty. One word and he realized how thirsty he was.

  “Okay,” he said again, then turned and looked at the dead woman beside him. He was sure that in life she had been very beautiful. The knowledge of a corpse sitting beside him had kicked in, but the ability to react to it hadn’t.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked her.

  He depressed the button down near his right hip and his seatbelt came loose. He slowly pulled it off of himself.

  “Do I know who you are?”

  The woman remained still, lifeless, staring at nothing.

  He let his head flop to the left and studied the door handle again. Lifted his hand and took hold of it again, tugged. A gentle click, nothing else. He leaned against the door and tried again, but again, nothing. He pushed hard against the door, but had little strength and the effort was futile. Giving up quickly, he eased back in his seat. The effort made him breathe harder, and he became aware that it hurt to breathe. He made himself take shallow breaths, then dropped his head and looked at his lap, then at his legs. He was also wearing jeans. They were dirty, there was blood on them, but they were jeans. And there were letters below the nine, or up above the six. Four letters, upside down: taeH. It took his mind a moment, but then he converted it. Heat. The Miami Heat. Six. Number Six of the Miami Heat: LeBron James. A basketball player. A basketball team.

  He smiled without moving his lips. The knowledge came so easily. So he liked basketball. He must. Why else would he be wearing the shirt? Jeans and a T-shirt, and if he could see his feet, he knew they’d have sneakers.

  Okay, so he remembered LeBron James, he remembered the Miami Heat, but he didn’t know his own name, or the name of the dead woman beside him.

  He coughed. It hurt worse to cough than it did to breathe. He looked at his legs again and became aware once more of the resonant, dreamlike birdcalls. After a minute he wriggled his toes.

  Success.

  As he wiggled them, his legs moved on from a sore numbness to a persistent dull ache. Then his whole body ached and his hands began to tremble. His right leg twitched; then the left one. He looked at the woman, then back at the door handle. He reached up and grabbed it, pushed his weight against the door. It didn’t budge. His legs twitched faster, and as they twitched and as he p
ushed, his heartbeat thumped and panic seized him. He heard whimpering sounds coming from his throat. He pushed harder against the door, pulled at the handle over and over, faster and faster, as though it would magically spring open if he just kept trying.

  Tears welled in his eyes, rinsing them. Then they ran down his cheeks and his whimpers became cries. He put all the weight he could against the door, but the damn thing wouldn’t move. Christ and a half, he couldn’t open a fucking door.

  It was the helplessness that got him. It turned his cries to screams, screams that echoed and mingled with the cadence of the disembodied birdcalls. There was an open window right there, right in front of him, right in his face, yet he couldn’t climb through it. He hurt too much to try and climb through it; too weak and feeble to climb his way through it.

  Eventually he quit. He fell back in his seat, breathing painful breaths. He glanced at the dead woman beside him, then brought his hands to his face and wept.

  ***

  Stop it!

  He must have cried for nearly an hour. The tears had run out a long time back, but he’d kept on crying, unable to stop, and would have continued, had the two-word demand not pulled him out of it.

  He looked out ahead of him. The sky had gone gray as the afternoon passed. Something skittered on the ground not far from the wreckage. It stopped and looked at him. He opened his mouth and almost said “Help,” but the word got stuck in his throat, and the squirrel darted, across the ground and then up a tree.

  He tapped his feet on the floorboard. The aches and pains were there, and at times they were excruciating, but his body was cooperating better now; movement was becoming less of a chore.

  He tried the door again. This time he didn’t expect any results, so he wasn’t let down when he didn’t get any. The sigh he expelled felt like heartburn as he turned and looked back at the woman, arm still dangling out the broken window, head still pressed against her shoulder strap, eyes still vacant, vapid, stagnant. Flies had found their way to her body. They seemed mostly focused on her wounds, and on her mouth and nose. There weren’t too many, but their numbers were growing. For a while he watched the flies gather, hypnotized by the sight. When they began paying more attention to her eyes, he turned away, convulsed, managed to just get his head out the window in time to vomit on the ground as panic slammed him once again.

  But the panic this time had a different effect. It motivated him. With his head out the window he stuck his arms through it, too, grabbed at outer parts of the car and pulled. His body squirmed as he contorted it in order to get his legs out from under the wheel. Every pain he felt intensified, and he cried out as his left hip brushed against the window frame.

  He moved his hands down the car’s crushed exterior, lowering himself closer to the ground, to where his own bile sat in a small puddle. He was almost out when he stopped, and the panic transitioned from motivation to paralysis. His right foot had somehow gotten hooked and was now wedged and stuck in a part of the steering wheel. His arms trembled with the strain of holding himself up. The tremble grew. His elbows wobbled. His shoulders seemed to be ripping apart. First he tried to push himself back up but couldn’t. He tried to unhook his foot but couldn’t do that either.

  Tears came again.

  Quit being such an asshole.

  His hands slipped. There was a crack in his ankle and blazing pain spidered up his leg as the world spun again. Then he landed face first in his own vomit, the rest of him dropping down like discarded laundry.

  Quivering in a heap of himself, the only true pain was the pain in his ankle. He wanted to scream but was beyond screaming. The pain was too intense. It was all too intense. And so an unworldly bird screamed for him. Its cry echoed through the trees, bounced off the rocks and then dissipated in a reverberating timbre, as blackness streaked with crimson pervaded his eyes and heart and mind. Then everything went away.

  ***

  “All you’re ever thinking about is yourself. I can’t go on in a relationship where the two people don’t love each other.”

  “Don’t love each other? I’ve only ever loved you.”

  ***

  It was nighttime when next he came to. The pain in his ankle and the ache of his nose stirred him into consciousness. He was in a heap on the ground, and he couldn’t stop blinking, and the blinking made a strobe light out of the moon.

  Eventually his eyelids slowed down. The trees, the earth, the rocks, the crushed white car, all of it was painted in a lunar-platinum glow.

  He struggled for a moment, then flopped onto his back and stared up at the sky, the moon and the stars. Twinkling up there, the stars brought comfort. Abstract comfort, but comfort nonetheless, and it was in this comfort that, for the first time, he asked himself where he was. It was easier to watch the stars than to turn his head. He drew a breath, sighed it out, enlivening the pains in his chest.

  Toppling over, rolling—that was as far back as he could remember, and even that memory was smudged. The only answer that came was a single word: clueless.

  He opened and closed his hands, flexing them. He let his head move and drop from side to side in hopes of getting it to work better, all the while keeping his gaze on the stars. He was so thirsty. It was thirst more than anything else that was getting him to move. Mere twitches at first, he began to move his shoulders, and curled and uncurled his left toes. He knew he couldn’t walk. Even if he hadn’t snapped his ankle, he wasn’t sure that his feet would have held him.

  Thirsty, so thirsty…

  Then he stopped. In the distance he heard a coyote call out. Then he moved his hands to his front pockets and patted them. There was nothing in his right pocket, but there were things in the left one. He clustered his fingers into a point and burrowed them into the tight denim opening, then splayed them and pulled the stuff out. Half a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and fingernail clippers with a foldout nail file. The cigarettes were broken in the pack, which was fine; he didn’t want to smoke. He hadn’t known he smoked until just now.

  The disposable lighter was blue or purple. The moon wouldn’t tell him which. No matter. He held it in his left hand and struck it. It sparked. He struck it again, and this time it came alight. He stared at the flame, smiled internally. He let it click off and dropped it beside him. Then he picked up the nail clippers. They gleamed in the moonlight. The nail file had a curved point at its tip. He stuffed them into his pocket, picked up the lighter and put it in his pocket, too. He left the cigarettes on the ground.

  There was nothing but desert wilderness around him. Desert wilderness and a totaled car, a dead woman inside it.

  A coyote called out again. This time a second howled out in return. Then a third one joined in, a fourth, a fifth. Cacophonous coyote calls, then they died down and faded away.

  He shifted and squirmed, then patted his back pockets. In the left one he found a wallet. His wallet, presumably. Its contents were few. There was some cash, a couple of credit cards, and a driver’s license. He took hold of the license and dropped everything else, tilted it until the moonlight splashed upon its face. His face. The face he’d seen in the rearview mirror, only a little younger and not so broken.

  His name was Derrick Cooper. He was thirty-four years old.

  Derrick Cooper.

  What’s your name?

  I’m Derrick Cooper.

  So entranced by the license, by the picture and the name, he was startled to find that he was sitting upright. His right leg was straight out in front of him, but his left leg had curled in, the knee drawn up slightly. He picked up the wallet and put his license back in it, put the wallet away and looked at the car. He remembered throwing up. He remembered the flies. He was aware of his thirst but it took a backseat to the curiosity of who was sitting in the front seat.

  With his arms and his left leg he scooted to the driver’s side door. He tried the outer handle several times but the door was locked solid. His eyelids drifted closed and he snapped them open. His breathing deepene
d, despite the pain. Shaking, he pushed his way backwards, toward the front of the car. His mind swam, accompanied by the sound of blood rushing in his ears. Then his arms gave up and he collapsed on his side, head upon his shoulder.

  What’s your name?

  I’m Derrick Cooper.

  How’d you get here?

  The car flipped over.

  How’d that happen?

  I’ve no idea.

  Temper.

  He lifted his head, clenched his teeth.

  Who said that?

  He leaned forward, pushed himself up with his elbows, braced himself for dizziness, which came and passed. He lifted his left leg, planted his foot into the ground, and pushed. He went over his arms and collapsed down, hit face first into the dirt and brush. He cried out once, struggled to breathe, then got up onto his elbows again and repeated the action. Twice more and he was halfway there, sprawled in front of the car, perspiration a second layer of skin, his sides, his back, his arms and shoulders and neck and head throbbing with aches, diminishing only slightly the pain of his broken foot.

  The coyotes sang out again. He was aware of their distance now. They weren’t too far away. He was aware of the car, aware of his thirst, aware of every bone and muscle in his body, aware of the pain and fatigue and dismay. Once more up on his elbows, left leg up, he pushed, and when he came down, all of his awareness slipped away.

  He places his hand on her hand, which rests on the car seat. He gives a small squeeze; she gives a small squeeze back. He glances at her with tenderness, then brings his eyes to the road and lifts his hand to the wheel.

  ***

  Something damp and cool made little sniffing noises in his ear.