One Buck Horror
Volume 2
edited by
Christopher Hawkins
Kris M. Hawkins
featuring stories by
Daniel Ausema
David Bischoff
Adam Howe
Sean Logan
Michael Penkas
cover art by
Shawn Conn
ISBN: 978-1-937346-01-0
Copyright © 2011 Coronis Publishing. All rights reserved.
www.onebuckhorror.com
Also Available
One Buck Horror, Volume One
Contents
What Swims These Waters by Daniel Ausema
Holes by Sean Logan
Beastie by David Bischoff
3 Monkeys by Adam Howe
The Afterlife of Ellen Easterling by Michael Penkas
What Swims These Waters
by Daniel Ausema
You don't remember the storm. Even I...well, it's easy to forget once the calm intrudes. I will try to remember. For your sake.
Spray splashed over me, soaking my feet where they anchored me in place. The dip and plunge of the boat pushed the gunwales into my chest. I shifted with the boat, feeling the wood rub the backs of my ankles raw.
“Hold on,” I muttered and tried again to pull my arms in. To pull my whole body up and back. It wouldn't budge. Your weight pulled me taut. “If you can reach...”
“I can't,” you said. Your voice was weak, water-weary, but not sad. You were beyond sadness.
“You don't have to.” I tried to make my voice strong. “The next wave. If it hits us right, I'll pull you in.”
“I can feel them, eating my toes.”
I couldn't stop the shudder that went through my tired muscles, but I hope you didn't feel that. “Your imagination. It's just the storm. Your toes will be fine. You can wiggle them in the sand again, once we're out of this.”
Remember when we first noticed them? We'd been bringing in half-gnawed fish for a few days and mending our nets more often than usual. You thought there was some new kind of fish in the water, and I told you not to be paranoid. I'm sorry I didn't believe you. We stopped swimming, though, and I missed seeing your body cut through the water. I don't think I ever told you that.
You were quiet, and I tried to time my next pull to match the motion of the waves and boat. I couldn't move you.
“I feel one on my knee,” you said. “It itches.” You sounded curious. The shock and the cold water had probably taken you past pain.
“Itching, see? Nothing to be afraid of. Some water bug biting you. You'll have crazy bug bites to show off when we get out.” You didn't laugh, and my attempt sounded like the croak of an old rooster who can't crow any more. “Fish nibbling the dead skin, maybe. Remember when we used to feel that, swimming in the ponds back home?”
“It's me that's dead, not just my skin,” you said, and whispered my old nickname, the one you hadn't used in ages. Your weight settled into the cold water, but I hung on. The storm smothered the words in our mouths.
You know, I can't even remember how long it was that we spent retreated into our cabin, afraid of the water without ever admitting it. Then they started crawling onto land. You didn't see them, though, and this time it was you who called me paranoid. I forgive you. As if that matters now.
The next wave pushed you up, but I couldn't do anything, and you dropped again as the boat rode the back of the wave. Failure. It tasted of salt and smelled like decaying fish.
I stared into the water, as if my gaze would keep them off your legs. Sometimes I imagined I saw them, flecks of light darting through the water, but I suppose that was mere fancy. The water was too dark to see anything. You might as well have been gone from your chest down, eaten not by them, but by the water, the storm, my own stupidity as we'd tried to keep rowing through the growing waves.
My feet were numb, the pressure of anchoring them pinching nerves. So were my hands, but that was the cold water. I couldn't feel your skin where I held you. Your head lolled with the waves. Numbness! I jerked my head back at the thought.
“It's the cold water,” I told you. “Nerves firing at nothing. They're not eating you. They probably don't like the storm any more than we do.”
I tried to shake you into answering, but you said nothing. Your eyes looked tired. But alive still, I assured myself. I braced my muscles to gather you in.
I talked while I waited. “Or...OK, they came from the water, but they probably don't eat anything during a storm. Maybe they like the land better anyway, at least in this weather.” I wanted you to answer, wanted to hear your voice. When you didn't, I rambled on. “See, it was a good thing we stayed out here. They're probably crawling up onto land with the storm like this. Hiding in our cabin until the water's calm.”
A wave came, and I yanked. You shifted. Your belly rose from the water, but that was all I could do. I felt you slipping slowly downward. I bit my lip and tried to will you to stay, hugging your body against the side of the boat.
Our vegetables had nibble marks. I hid that from you, cutting away the evidence. I wondered if they would eat the boat, too. If a carrot is vulnerable to them, why not a rowboat? I may have told you that they wouldn't bite during the storm, but that doesn't mean I believed it myself.
I think I dozed off. I still held you when the storm was gone. In the calm water, I pulled you in easily. What was left of you. I arranged you in the boat how I'm sure you would have wanted. Relaxed, leaning back, aware of your surroundings.
The water in the bottom of the boat is growing. I've bailed out what the storm poured in, but there's a hole somewhere. Or maybe many holes, growing as they nibble away. I try to keep my feet out, resting them on the struts, but it's easy to forget.
When I drop them into the water and try to row us to shore, I feel them, nibbling at the dead skin of my feet. It tickles, and I find I'm not afraid.
Holes
by Sean Logan
Edray crouched in an alley around the corner from the place, waiting for Alex to show up with whatever he could get. There was a full moon out, a bright, infected yellow against the starless night. It didn’t look like a solid object out there in the nothingness, but like a hole cut in the sky, like he was looking down the drain of a black sink. He felt like that hole might just suck him up. Maybe it would suck up this whole damn city and they could all go swirling down the drain together.
Edray looked around the corner and saw Alex coming, shuffling and twitching, looking nervous as hell, like he didn’t belong here, like he wasn’t the same pick-pocket, backdoor, low-level confidence snake as Edray. But for all his nerves, the kid would do anything for him and had the jagged scar on his belly to prove it. He’d stepped between Edray and a mark’s blade, and now Edray owed him his life. And here was Alex again, risking his life with no angle for himself. Just helping a friend.
Edray waved him into the alley. “So what’d you get?”
Alex pulled a paper bag from under his coat and took out a gun, something black and square like a cop would use.
“So what is it? What kind of piece?”
“I don’t know, man,” Alex said, checking over his shoulder. “The kind that shoots bullets.”
“How’s it work?”
“You squeeze the trigger! It’s a goddamn gun. What do you want from me?”
Edray wasn’t bothered by his tone. Alex got snappy when he was tense. “I mean, like, do I have to cock it or anything? Does it have that thing where it kicks back at you?”
“A little. You have to re-aim each time you shoot, but it’s not going to knock you over. And no, you don’t have to cock it. Just squeeze th
e trigger like I said.”
Edray took it from him, turned it over in his hand, aimed it at a leaking bag of garbage. It was lighter than it looked, lighter than something should be that could do what it did. It felt like no big deal. “Where’d you get it?”
“Does it matter?”
It didn’t. Edray started walking to the place, feeling nervous himself, Alex following close behind, all knotted up inside his coat.
“You know, the whole way over here,” Alex said, “all I could think about was that thing going off and shooting me in the armpit.” He laughed. “I could really feel it—a big hot chunk of lead hitting me straight in the pit!”
Edray didn’t say anything. He turned the corner. The place was half a block away, an old flat surrounded by industrial workspace.
Alex filled the silence. “So you sure she’s there? Somebody told you that?”
Someone did. And when he heard where his sister ended up, he felt sick to his stomach, because he was the one that first brought her there. Just a quick stop for some party favors on the way to the club. She was no delicate flower—she was only seventeen, but she’d been around the block a few times—but this place was over her head. He’d tried to get her to wait in the car.
“Gimme a break,” she said. “You think I don’t know what you and your scummy friends are up to up there? I’m going.”
Inside, B The Man flirted with her, and seeing that doughy, speed-dealing bully try to get over on his sister made Edray want to put a thumb in his eye. Noelissa flirted back, but she’d flirt with a streetlamp if it would pay attention to her.
“So you want the usual?” B said. “‘Cause I got something special.” He took a vial of milky white liquid from the pocket of his sweats. “Most people shoot it, but you can drink it if you want. You want?”
“No. What is it?” Edray said.
“Let’s just say it’s something special. It’s the reason I moved out here.”
“I’ll just take the regular.”
Noelissa clasped her hands together girlishly. “Oh, I want something special!”
B smiled, trying to look seductive. “Then I guess I’ll just have to give you something special.”
And he must have, because she never made it into the club. She curled up in the back seat of Edray’s Charger, hugging herself and smiling a dreamy smile. A month later she stopped coming home. Six months later, no one’s seen her.
Their ma wasn’t exactly crying herself to sleep. The old lady hadn’t been knocking herself out calling hospitals, searching for her little girl. But Noelissa usually let Edray know what she was up to, and her disappearing meant something was off. He had a fist-sized knot in his gut that told him what happened to her—and that it was his fault.
- - -
Edray stuffed the gun in the back of his pants, and knocked on the steel door.
“Who is it?” It sounded like B The Man was yelling across the room.
“It’s Edray.”
There was shuffling, feet stomping across the room, then from the other side of the door: “You got anyone with you?”
“I got a buddy of mine, Alex G. I don’t think you’ve met, but he’s all right. People know him.”
B cracked the door and peered out past them. “All right,” he said and stepped aside, looking put out. His saggy, pale face was shadowed with a week’s stubble, framed by a mop of oily hair. The living room was a mess, littered with clothes and dirty plates, pizza boxes, barely lit with a dreary, piss-yellow lamp. There was a bony girl sprawled on the couch with her skirt hiked up around her waist, one veiny tit spilling out of her open blouse. She was probably hot ten pounds and a few sleepless nights ago, but to Edray, she looked like a corpse.
B slicked his hair back. It was so greasy it held. “So you guys just looking to score or you want to get hooked up?” B narrowed his eyes at Edray. “You even know what I mean? It’s been a while since you’ve been here. Things have changed a little bit.”
Edray didn’t know what he meant, but he played along. “We want to get hooked up.”
“Four bills for the two of you.”
Edray pulled a knot of cash out of his pocket and saw Alex’s eyes get big. He counted out four hundred in tens and twenties.
B shoved the cash into the pocket of his sweats. “You know what you’re doing or you need me to show you?”
“We’ve got it covered.”
“Go ahead and take any room down the hall, wherever you can find a spot.”
The bony girl on the couch propped herself up on an elbow, her eyes half-closed. “Can I go too?”
“I’m not through with you yet,” B said, heading for the couch and untying the string on the waistband of his sweats.
Alex whispered to Edray, “Is he going to give us anything for that four hundy?”
“I guess not,” Edray said. “Let’s just get Noe and get out of here. And I’m gonna need that cash back before we go. However we have to do it.”
The hallway was dark, just thin, orange rectangles of light coming from two of the rooms. Edray signaled to Alex to take the room on the left side while he took the right. He opened the first door on a candlelit room, eight or nine people sitting on the floor and sagging against the walls. None of them were his sister. He shut the door, and as he did, he got a sense that something was wrong. There was something going on in that room that he didn’t catch at first glance. The sight of half-comatose junkies was bad enough, but there was something worse.
Alex was in the hallway looking scared as hell, even by his standards, eyes wide, breathing heavy. He nodded at the room across the hall. The door was open, but there was no candlelight coming from inside. Edray approached it feeling what he saw in Alex’s eyes, fear squeezing his chest and crawling up his spine.
Alex had the pen-light he used for B&E work. He flicked it on and a stark spot of light hit the stained, matted carpet. The narrow beam zig-zagged across a room that looked disturbingly sterile even though the light cut over human forms, pantlegs, shirtsleeves, sneakers.
The light settled on a face, and Edray felt a sick pain in the center of his chest. It was the pale face of a young, bearded man with shaggy hair. The eyes were closed, the lids dark. It was the face of a dead man.
Edray turned away from the room. If his sister was in there, he wasn’t ready to face that yet. There was still one more room at the end of the hall. He took the gun from his waistband, his other hand on the doorknob. Alex was right at his shoulder.
He opened the door. A single candle burned in the center of the floor, throwing a flickering orange light on a half dozen drooping people. The room was warm and thick with the smell of human grease.
Noelissa was heaped in the corner, eyes closed, head swaying. She was alive.
Edray pushed the gun into Alex’s hands and rushed across the room to her, but as he did he got that same sense of wrongness he got from the other room. And by the time he reached her he saw what it was. Coming from holes in the walls, crawling up from cracks in the floor, creeping across skin, into bare flesh--dozens of snakes, or worms, something long and slithering. They were thin and grayish-green, something living, and penetrating the skin of the dreamy, slouching people in the room--of his sister.
He grabbed her face and turned it up toward him. She half-opened her eyes and smiled. “Eddie!” She turned to an emaciated bottle-blonde to her right. “It’s my brother Eddie,” she said to the unconscious girl.
One of the snakes—the tentacles—was going into her arm, just above the inside of the wrist. It was the width of a pencil, reaching up from a space between two floorboards. Edray grabbed it, slick and muscular in his palm, jerking from side to side, fighting against his grip. He pulled and it slid out, whipping like a cat’s tail, milky liquid and blood trickling from the dilated hole in his sister’s arm.
The smile faded from her face. Edray got one arm under her knees and the other under her bony arms. He lifted, dead weight but she barely seemed to weigh anything.
The tentacle reached up toward her, standing upright two feet from the floor.
“Get your fucking hands off her!”
Edray turned to see B The Man in the doorway, holding a shotgun.
“She’s not going anywhere,” B said, aiming the gun at Edray’s chest.
But B didn’t see Alex just inside the doorway. Alex raised the gun to B’s head.
B turned the shotgun upright and pumped a bullet into the chamber—cha-chick. He pointed the barrel back toward Edray and his sister.
Alex fired, a hard crack and a fine spray of blood from B’s temple, another louder crack, the shotgun blasting as B fell, the shot hitting the wall just to Edray’s right.
A piercing shriek. It wasn’t Noelissa. It wasn’t anyone in the room. It came from below them. There was a sliding sound inside the walls, tentacles drawing away, slipping out of the junkies and wriggling back into the walls like noodles being slurped up.
Edray carried his sister toward the door as the floorboards in the opposite corner of the room started splitting, cracking upwards, a dark mound rising up from below, something massive, broken boards falling away, revealing a shimmery black eye against grayish-green flesh.
Edray set his sister down and grabbed B’s shotgun, cocked it and fired at the growing mound. Another shriek, white liquid spilling from the wound, a tentacle shooting out, bigger than the others, as big around as Edray, smaller tentacles branching out from its end.
Edray cocked and fired. Alex fired the pistol. Deafening blasts. Flashes of light. Shrieking. Smoke filing the room. More tentacles bursting up through the floorboards, out through the walls.
Edray felt a sharp pain in his arm, followed immediately by a beautiful wash of warmth that spread out and up toward his brain. A tentacle had slipped out from the wall behind him and pierced his arm. He yanked it out, the tip spurting white, and a sad coldness replaced the beautiful warmth.
Alex fired the last of the bullets into the creature as it wailed, tentacles whipping around the room.
One Buck Horror: Volume Two Page 1