Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales

by Norman Partridge

Steve scratched at the smooth surface, trying to find purchase and push off.

  His fingers found a rough circle in front of his face.

  A feel like wood.

  He tore the circle away and bubbles boiled up below. He opened his mouth. Gagged on water, but found air, also. Forced his face down against the circular gap he'd opened and sucked a deep breath.

  Now that he had air, he realized that nothing was holding him. Only his imagination. Only....

  A last trickle of bubbles tickled over his cheek. Time to get to the surface. His heels slipped on the glassy mounds — one of the pointed knobs speared his instep — and he didn't get a good push, but it was enough.

  Steve broke surface, bobbing like a great cork.

  And, gasping deep breaths, he stared at the cork in his hand.

  The fire crackled. Steve held his hands before it, flexing the numbness from his fingers.

  "Man, you scared the shit out of us," Pete said. "You were down way too long."

  Steve rubbed his knuckles. "You're telling me that they left? The girls, I mean. They just got out of the water and walked away?"

  "Yeah," Chet said, spinning the empty wine bottle on the pebbly shore. "Didn't say a word, either. Just kind of glared at us." He chuckled. "Like a couple of angry Amazons."

  "They didn't leave empty-handed, though," Pete added. "Both of 'em found a bottle down there. I'll bet that there are a dozen cases of wine in this lake. Guess everybody knows about it. It's too bad we've got to break camp tomorrow, or we could fill our packs with good stuff."

  Steve added a branch to the fire. "You saw all three of them, right? You saw the first girl, too?"

  "Well, it was dark. And half the time we were watching out for you. But hell, Steve, of course she had to go. The others wouldn't have gone without her, now would they?"

  "I don't know," Steve said. "If you didn't see her, I just don't know." He stared at the flames, then at the lake. The full moon's reflection swam on the black surface like a shimmering dish.

  "Look at that," Pete said. "So damn clear. You can see the eyes of the man in the moon."

  They were quiet for a moment. The only sound was the scratching of pebbles against glass as Chet spun the wine bottle.

  Chet said, "I wish they would have come over here. Man, an empty bottle to spin and everything. You know that would have been fun."

  Pete grabbed up a flaming branch and tossed it out over the lake. Sparking, it twisted end over end and splashed into the liquid moon.

  A slash of red suddenly gone black.

  "Don't do that," Steve said.

  The reflection smoothed, and once again Steve could see the eyes of the moon shimmering in the water. Black eyes. Liquid black.

  Not the eyes of a man at all.

  The bottle spun to a stop, pointing at Steve.

  Chet laughed. Spun again.

  Pebbles scratched glass.

  The bottle pointed at the moon.

  On Zombies … And Hunger

  Only two of the stories in the original edition of Mr. Fox were reprints. The other five were originals—which, for the uninitiated, means they were stories that had never before seen publication.

  That doesn't mean that I wrote them specifically for Mr. Fox. Nope. Most of those stories had kicked around the small press a little bit without being accepted. Some were revised and buffed up for Mr. Fox, some I left alone. Of the others, one had been accepted but never published, and two had been rejected by theme anthologies published by the mainstream press.

  For most of us who got our feet wet in the small press scene in the early nineties, getting a story accepted for a theme anthology was the first step in advancing to the pro ranks. There were a lot of books like that coming out of NYC in those days. Some themes were pretty broad (say, an anthology of ghost stories), while some were more constraining (ghost stories that take place in haunted houses), and some were damn near impossibly specific (ghost stories that take place in ranch-style haunted houses located five miles south of Possum Shit, North Dakota).

  Quite a few anthologies focused on a particular type of monster (vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc.). Others focused on specific characters (the usual suspects like Dracula or Frankenstein, and once in a while some less expected choices like Elvis Presley or—gasp—magician David Copperfield). To be honest, some of the themes were pretty silly. Not quite as bad as my ranch-style haunted house example in the last paragraph... but close.[24]

  Anyway, landing a spot in the best of those anthologies could get you noticed. Everyone in the business read them. Publishers, editors, agents. If you were a new writer and you scored with a story in an anthology published by a mainstream press—say your piece was singled out for praise by reviewers, or earned a slot in a Year's Best anthology, or was nominated for an award—you could get little bit of a buzz going. At the very least, editors or agents might recognize your name and give your work a little extra attention the next time they fished one of your manuscripts out of the slush pile.

  Several of the stories I placed in theme anthologies helped me build a reputation as a newcomer worth watching. Like the early stories I had in Cemetery Dance, these tales introduced my work to editors who invited me to submit to their own books. More often than not, I followed up on those offers. But even in the professional market, the money for short stories wasn't great. Most editors paid somewhere between five and ten cents a word, and god help you if you ever expected to see a royalty check. Still, every now and then you might catch a little lightning in a bottle. One example: my tale in Poppy Brite's Love in Vein antho probably earned me more money than my first novel did. Love in Vein was originally published in 1994, but I still get royalty checks on that piece, and over the years I've even had a few nibbles on it from Hollywood.

  Of course, not everyone saw theme anthologies as a good idea. I knew a few writers who refused outright to submit stories to any anthology of this sort. They preferred to follow their own artistic sensibilities. They disliked the idea of the marketplace directing their muse. In their view, any writer who wrote for theme anthologies was selling out.

  I saw this as an exceedingly precious point of view, but then again I've never been much on muses. Mostly, I trust my gut. And when it came to theme anthologies, my gut and I saw it this way: some of these projects were opportunities, and others were disasters waiting to happen?[25] I figured I was smart enough to know the difference.

  It was really as simple as that. My goal was to be a professional writer. I wanted to succeed both critically and commercially, and writing for theme anthologies was a means to that end. Besides, crafting a story within the constraints of a particular theme could be a challenge. Writing those stories took me to places as a writer that I wouldn't otherwise have gone. They made me stretch in ways I hadn't expected. The proof of that is in the work I published in some of those anthologies. I'm thinking of stories like "Styx" in Peter Straub's Ghosts, "Coyotes" in Scott Urban and Marty Greenberg's The Conspiracy Files, and "Do Not Hasten to Bid Me Adieu" in Poppy Brite's Love in Vein. Those tales are all personal favorites, and I doubt that I would have written any of them if I hadn't been forced to "think inside the box" presented to me by those editors.

  I wrote "In Beauty, Like the Night" as a submission for Skipp & Spector's Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, an anthology set in the universe of George Romero's zombie movies. The first volume had gained a lot of attention, with stories by Stephen King, Ed Bryant, Robert McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, David Schow, Richard Laymon, and a host of others. The second volume looked to be more of the same.

  I wanted to place a story in that book. Badly. First off, I was a huge fan of Romero's zombie movies. Second, I was certain that I had Skipp & Spector's number. Mailing my manuscript, I figured there was no way on earth that the splatterpunk[26] boys could turn down "In Beauty, Like the Night." I mean, I wrote a story about a Hugh Hefner-style impresario who was trapped on a desert island with a bunch of zombie centerfold girls. "In Beauty..." fe
atured a lone wolf armed with a Heckler & Koch P7M13, airplane crashes, cocaine and Cuervo Gold and, well... zombie centerfold girls. How could a couple of splatterpunks turn down a story like that?

  Guess what. They did.

  And I was stuck with a rejected zombie story, one that had taken me three weeks to write. Ouch. I'm sure I wasn't the only one paddling around in that particular canoe, and if those other writers saw things the way I did they knew that submitting a bounced zombie story to another market at that time would have been a waste of postage.

  Now, I don't want you to get the idea that a single rejection slip signs a story's death warrant. Usually, it doesn't work that way. In fact, one rejection wouldn't much matter to me if we were talking about a story that wasn't intended for a theme anthology—in that case. I'd simply give the piece a read-through, maybe do some revising, then get it out to the next market on my list.

  But with a story that was written for something as specific as Book of the Dead 2, a single rejection could matter bigtime. One thumbs down and a story like that could end up the double-spaced equivalent of a busted flush, because any editor who put a letter opener to an envelope containing a submission that smelled of George Romero's zombies would add two and two together and figure they'd just been sent a package jam-packed with damaged goods. They'd know that the story had already been bounced by Skipp & Spector, and that would probably be enough reason for them to bounce it, too.

  And why would they do that, Norm? you ask. My answer is simple. No one likes sloppy seconds, pal. Especially editors.

  There's not much you can do about that. Sometimes things don't work out. Your story bounces. You put that story in a drawer somewhere and you try not to think about it. Maybe a few years down the line you take it out and dust it off, submit it somewhere else. Maybe not.

  In one sense, it doesn't really matter what you do with that story.

  What matters is that you don't dwell on the rejection when it comes.

  What matters is that you find yourself another market and write something else.

  Just a few points that I want to reinforce before I finish up here:

  First: always have your eye on the next rung of the career ladder. I started off selling stories in the small press. It was a great place to get rolling, but I didn't want to make a home there. I was always looking for opportunities to break into the professional marketplace. Most pro anthologies were "invitation only" markets, but a few were open to anyone. When I was starting out, Charlie Grant's Shadows was an open market; these days, it's the same with Tom Monteleone's Borderlands series. Quality markets are out there if you're willing to look for them (try ralan.com. or Kathy Ptacek's Gila Queen's Guide to Markets, or Judi Rohrig's Hellnotes). Submitting to those markets should be a top priority.

  And always remember to send your stories to the best markets first— the ones that pay the most; the ones with the highest circulation. It's like an old pulp writer told me a long time ago: "When you submit a story, always aim high. Editors will be more than happy to tell you if you've fallen short."

  Second: an open professional market is an opportunity to earn your chops. Don't take an opportunity like that lightly. Step up to the plate. Challenge yourself. Get serious and work hard.

  I remember how it felt to write stories aimed at markets I figured were beyond my reach. I knew the competition was fierce, but I was hungry. It was a special kind of hunger, and it drove me to try things in my fiction that I wouldn't have attempted if I'd decided to play it safe and write another story for a small press market I was sure I could crack.

  Working that way was like trying to ride a tiger. At times I was convinced that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and I was sure that tiger would buck me off and maul me for trying to do such a damn fool thing. Sometimes I'd type "The End," drop my story in the mail, and immediately wish that I could snatch my envelope out of the mailbox and bury it (pretty deeply) in a drawer somewhere. In the weeks that followed I'd walk out to my mailbox, fearing that I was about to receive a rejection letter nasty enough to destroy my confidence for life. But it didn't work out that way for me, and seeing my efforts pay off with story sales that moved me up a notch made me want to aim higher, and having writers I'd grown up reading tell me that I was writing some damn fine stories of my own was a special kind of validation that made me keep trying just a little bit harder.

  So, you're a new writer. I'll bet that you're hungry, too. Let me tell you, that hunger is a tool. Use it to drive yourself and your creative engine. Get it into your stories. Get it down on the page. Get those pages in front of editors.

  Your hunger is a source of strength.

  In truth, there isn't one that's finer.

  IN BEAUTY, LIKE THE NIGHT

  The beach was deserted.

  Somehow, they knew enough to stay out of the sun.

  Nathan Grimes rested his elbows on the balcony and peered through his binoculars. As he adjusted the focus knob, the smooth, feminine mounds that bordered the crescent-shaped beach became nets of purslane and morning glory, and the green blur that lay beyond sharpened to a crazy quilt of distinct colors — emerald, charcoal, glimpses of scarlet — a dark panorama of manchineel trees, sea grapes, and coconut palms.

  Nathan scanned the shadows until he found the golden-bronze color of her skin. Naked, just out of reach of the sun's rays, she leaned against the gentle curve of a coconut palm, curling a strand of singed blonde hair around the single finger that remained on her left hand. Her fingertip was red —with nail polish, not blood —and she thrust it into her mouth and licked both finger and hair, finally releasing a spit curl that fought the humid Caribbean breeze for a moment and then drooped in defeat.

  Kara North, Miss December.

  Nathan remembered meeting Kara at the New Orleans Mansion the previous August. She'd posed in front of a bountifully trimmed Christmas tree for Teddy Ching's centerfold shot, and Nathan—fresh off a plane from the Los Angeles offices of Grimesgirl magazine — had walked in on the proceedings, joking that the holiday decorations made him feel like he'd done a Rip Van Winkle in the friendly skies.

  Nathan smiled at the memory. There were several elegantly wrapped packages under the tree that August day, but each one was empty, just a prop for Teddy's photo shoot. Kara had discovered that sad fact almost immediately, and they'd all had a good laugh about her mercenary attitude while Teddy shot her with a little red Santa cap on her head and sassy red stockings on her feet and nothing but golden-bronze flesh in between.

  Empty boxes. Nathan shook his head. He'd seen the hunger in Kara's eyes when the shoot was over. A quick study, that one. Right off she'd known that he alone could fill those boxes in a finger-snap.

  And now she knew enough to stay out of the sun. They all did. Nathan had been watching them for two days, ever since the morning after the accident. He wasn't worried about them breaking into the house, for his Caribbean sanctuary was a Moorish palace surrounded by high, broken-bottle-encrusted walls that were intended to fend off everyone from prying paparazzi to anti-porn assassins. No, the thing that worried him about the dead Grimesgirls was that they didn't act at all like the zombies he'd seen on television.

  Most of those miserable gut-buckets had crawled out of the grave and weren't very mobile. In fact, Nathan couldn't remember seeing any zombies on the tube that bore much of a resemblance to their living brethren, but that could simply be chalked up to the journalistic penchant for photographing the most grotesque members of any enemy group. It was an old trick. Just as they'd once focused attention on the most outrageous members of the SDS and the Black Panthers in order to turn viewers against those groups, the media would now focus on the most bizarre specimens of this current uprising.

  Uprising. It was an odd word to choose —once such a hopeful word for Nathan's generation — but it seemed somehow appropriate, now stirring images not of demonstration but of reanimation. Cemeteries pitted with open graves, shrouds blowing across empty boulevards...
midnight glimpses of a shadow army driven by an insatiable hunger for human flesh.

  Nathan wondered what the network anchors would make of Kara North. All theories about media manipulation aside, he doubted that there were many other suntanned zombies besides last year's Miss December. Stateside, the victims of an accident such as the one that had occurred on Grimes Island would have been devoured by predator zombies before reanimation could occur. That hadn't happened here, because there weren't any predator zombies on the island when Kara and the others had perished. So something different had happened here, maybe something that hadn't happened before, anywhere.

  Kara raised her good hand in what might have been a feeble wave.

  "Freaks," Nathan whispered, unable to fight off his signature wry smile. "Zombie freaks." He set down the binoculars — an expensive German product, for Nathan Grimes demanded the best in everything—and picked up his pistol, a Heckler & Koch P7M13, also German, also expensive.

  The sun inched lower in the sky. The waves became silver mirrors, glinting in Nathan's eyes. He put on sunglasses and the glare flattened to a soft pearly glow. As the horizon melted electric blue and the shadows thickened beneath the coconut palms, Kara North, Miss December, shambled toward the glass-encrusted walls of Nathan's beachfront palace. Again, she curled a lock of blonde hair around her finger. Again, she sucked the burned strands wet.

  Strange that she could focus on her hair and ignore her mutilated hand, Nathan thought as he loaded the Heckler. His gut told him that her behavior was more than simple instinct, and he wondered just how far her intelligence extended. Did she know that she was dead? Was she capable of posing such a question?

  Could she think?

  The curl drooped, uncoiled, and again Kara went to sucking it. Nathan remembered a Christmas that had come in August complete with the holiday smells of hot buttered rum and Monterey pine, the sounds of the air-conditioner running on HIGH COOL and seasoned oak crackling in the fireplace. He recalled Kara's dreams and the way she kissed and her red nails slashing through wrapping paper as she opened gifts he'd originally intended for Ronnie. And then, when he was fully ready to surrender to his memories, the shifting July winds brushed back across Grimes Island, carrying the very real stink of scorched metal and charred rubber.