“What’s your plan for the day?” he asked.
“Housework,” she said. “You?”
“Get up early and hit the Laundromat,” he said.
She nodded.
“And since that didn’t work?”
“Do an emergency load in the sink to get through work tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve got to meet up with Gemma at three to get back my scanner.” “You’ll need to get hopping. It’s past noon now.”
“Another few minutes won’t make a difference,” he said, putting his hand over hers. He wasn’t pretty; his face too wide, his nose bent where it had broken as a child and never been put right, his jaw touched by the presentiment of jowls. Handsome, maybe, in an off-putting way. “Is there something to talk about?”
“Is,” she said.
He took a long, slow breath and let it out slowly. Not a sigh so much as the preparatory breath of a high diver. Or a man steeling himself for bad news.
“I think you should come over tonight,” she said. “Take a look at the place. Bring your laundry, too.”
He sat up. The blankets dropped to his lap. She looked at him, unable to read his expression.
“You’re changing the rules?” he said. Each word was as gentle as picking up eggs.
“No, I’m not. I always said that the not coming over part was temporary. It’s just . . . time. That’s all.”
“So. You really aren’t breaking up with me?”
“Jesus,” she said. She took the pillow from under her head and hit him with it lightly. Then she did it again.
“It is traditional,” he said. “Girl gets a house without consulting her boyfriend, moves all her stuff out, tells him he can’t come over. Says she’s ‘working through something’ but won’t say what exactly it is? It’s hard not to connect those dots.”
“And the part where I tell you in simple declarative sentences that I’m not breaking up with you?”
“Goes under mixed signals,” he said.
She took a deep breath. On the street, a siren rose and fell.
“Sorry,” she said. She got up from the bed, pulling one of the sheets with her and wrapping it around her hips. “Look, I understand that this has been hard. I’ve asked for a lot of faith.”
“You really have.”
“And given that I don’t have an entirely uncheckered past, and all,” she said. “I see why you would freak. You and my mother both.”
“Your mother?”
“She’s been reading me the riot act ever since she heard about it. She really likes you.”
He leaned back, surprise and pleasure in his expression.
“Your mother likes me?”
“Focus, sweetheart. I’m apologizing here.”
“And I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said.
Relief had left him giddy. Between his brave face and her attention being elsewhere, she’d managed to ignore the sadness and dread that had been seeping into him. Now that it was lifting a little, she saw how deep it had gone. She found her pants in a heap on the floor, sat down at the dressing table and lit a cigarette. The taste of the smoke helped her to think. When she spoke, her voice was lower.
“I’ve had a rough ride this life, you know? I used to be ashamed of that. I used to think that after Nash I was . . . Broken. Damaged goods. Like that. And feeling like that has . . . ”
She stopped, shook herself, laughed at something, and took another drag.
“Feeling like that has haunted me,” she said, with an odd smile.
“And this house is part of not feeling that way?”
“It is.”
“Then I already like it,” he said. “Sight unseen. If it helps you see yourself the way I see you, then it’s on my side.”
Corrie chuckled and shook her head.
“That might be going a little far,” she said. “But anyway. I want you to come over. I want you to see it. You should bring a sweater. It gets kind of cold sometimes.”
“I’m there.”
“And I want you to think about whether you’d like to move in.”
“Corrie?”
“There’s enough room. The neighborhood’s a little sketchy, and the jet noise sucks, but not worse than the juke box hero practicing all the time.”
“Corrie, are you saying you still want to live with me?”
Her smile was tight and nervous.
“Not asking for a decision,” she said. “But I’m opening negotiations.”
He slipped to the side of the bed, slid to the floor at her feet, and laid his head in her lap. For a long moment, neither of them moved or spoke, then Corrie wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Come on, silly,” she said. “You’ve got to get ready for Gemma. Go get that scanner back.”
“I do,” he said with a sigh. “Come shower with me?”
“Not today,” she said. And when he raised his eyebrows, “I want to smell like you when I get home.”
1532 Lachmont Drive seethed around her. Every noise—the hum of the refrigerator, the distant roar of the furnace, the ticking of the wooden floors as the push-pull of heat and cold adjusted the boards—had voices behind them, screaming. The faintest smell of hair and skin burning touched the air. She knew they were meant to be hers.
Corrie hung her coat in the closet. A shape flickered in the basement doorway, dark eyes and inhuman teeth. She set a kettle on the stove top and smoked a cigarette while it heated. When the clouds outside broke, the doubled light of sky and snow pressed in at the blinds. The kettle whistled. She took a mug out of the cupboard, put in a bag of chamomile tea, and poured the steaming water in. When she sat down, there was blood on the floor. A bright puddle, almost too red to be real, and then a trail wide as a man’s hips where the still-living man had been dragged across to the basement door. When she looked up, the air had a layer of smoke haze a foot below the ceiling. It might have been her cigarette. It might have been gun smoke. She sipped her tea, savoring the heat and the faint sweetness.
“Fine,” she said.
She stood up slowly, stretching. The stairs down to the basement were planks of wood painted a dark, chipping green. The years had softened the edges. The basement had none of the brightness of the day above it. Even with the single bare bulb glowing, the shadows were thick. The furnace roar was louder here, and the voice behind it spat rage and hatred. She followed the trail of blood to the corner of the basement, where washer and dryer sat sullen in the gloom. She leaned down, put her shoulder to the corner of the dryer, and shifted it.
The metal feet shrieked against the concrete. The scar under it was almost three feet wide, a lighter place where the floor had been broken, taken up, and then filled in with a patch of almost-matching cement. She sat down on the dusty floor. There was blood on her hands now, black and sticky and copper-smelling. A spot of white appeared on the odd concrete and began to spread: frost. She put her hand on it like she was caressing a pet.
“We should probably talk,” she said. “And when I say that, I mean that I should talk, and you, for once, should listen.”
Something growled from the corner by the furnace. A shadow detached from the gloom and began pacing like a tiger in its cage. She sipped her tea and looked around the darkness, her gaze calm and proprietary.
“It’s funny the things they get wrong, you know? They remember that you threatened Joe Arrison, but instead of his nose, you were going to cut off his cock. They know I went to the Laughing Academy, but they don’t remember that I got out. Apparently, I was going on about Satan or something. ‘Mind gone to putty.’ ”
She stroked the concrete. The frost was spreading. A dot of red smeared it at the center, blood welling up from the artificial stone.
“And you really screwed me up, you know?” she said. “Shooting you really was worse than I thought it would be. I was so scared that someone would find you. I had nightmares all the time. I’d see someone who looked a little like you or I’d smell that cheap-ass cologne you lik
ed, and I’d start panicking. I even tried to kill myself once. Didn’t do a very good job of it.
“I was one messed up chica. Every couple weeks, I’d do a search online. I just knew that there was going to be something. Bones found at 1532 Lachmont Drive. So what do I find instead? Ghost stories. There was one that even had a drawing of you. And so, I knew, right?”
The shadow shrieked at her, its mouth glowing like there was something burning inside it. The blood at the center of the frost became a trickle. Corrie let the icy flow stain her fingers.
“I was so freaked out,” she said, laughing. “I spent years putting myself back together, and here you still were. I don’t think I slept right for a month. And then one day, something just clicked, you know? I’ve got a job. I can buy a house if I want.”
She sipped at her tea, but it had gone cold. She was sitting in a spreading pool of gore now, the blood spilling out to the corners of the room. More blood than a real body could contain. It soaked her pants and wicked up her shirt, chilling her, but not badly. The shadow hunched forward, ready to leap.
“David’s coming over tonight,” she said. “I wasn’t going to let him until I was sure it was safe. But tonight, I’m going to make him dinner, and we’re probably going to get a little high, watch a DVD, something like that. And then I’m going to fuck him in your bedroom. And you? You’re going to watch.”
The blood rushed up. It was almost ankle-deep now, tiny waves of red rising up through the basement. Corrie smiled.
“You’ll really hate him,” she said. “He is everything you could never be, and he really, really loves me. And you know what? I love him too. And we’re going to be here, maybe for years. Maybe forever. And we’re going to do everything you couldn’t. And we’re going to do it right. So, seriously. How’s that for revenge?”
The shadow screamed, rising up above her, blotting out the light. She could almost feel its teeth at her neck. She scratched.
“You’re dead, fucker,” she whispered to the darkness. “You can’t hurt me.”
Blood-soaked, she picked up her teacup and walked to the stairs. The ghost whipped at her with cold, insubstantial fingers. It screamed in her ears, battering her with anger and hatred. Corrie grinned, a sense of peace and calm radiating from her. The voice grew thinner, more distant, richer with despair. With each step she took, the visions of blood faded a little more, and by the time she stepped into the winter light, she was clean.
It is the nature of parents to give and children to take. Despite the pain children can inflict, good parents try to protect them, keep promises to them, do what’s best for them . . . even when the world is full of monsters . . .
ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THIS IS HEAVEN?
SARAH LANGAN
I.
He Gets Bit
The midday sun slaps Conrad Wilcox’s shoulders and softens the blacktop highway so that his shoes sink just slightly. It’s a wide road with a middle island upon which Magnolias bloom. Along the sides of the street are parked or crashed cars, most of them rusted. He’s got three more miles to go, and then, if his map is correct, a left on Emancipation Place. Two more miles after that, and he’ll reach whatever’s left of the Louisiana State Correctional Facility for women. He’ll reach Delia.
Along the highway-side grass embankment lies a green traffic sign that has broken free from its metal post. It reads:
WELCOME TO BATON ROUGE—AUTHENTIC LOUISIANA AT EVERY TURN!
And under that, in scripted spray-paint:
PLAGUE ZONE—KEEP OUT!
Conrad wipes his brow with the back of an age-spot-dappled hand and keeps walking. He’s come nearly two thousand miles, and he buried his fear back in Tom’s River, along with the bodies. In fear’s place came hysteria, followed by paralysis, depression, the urge to do self-harm, and, finally, the enduring numbness with which he has sustained his survival. But so close to the end, his numbness cracks like an external skeleton. His chest and groin feel exposed, as if they’ve loosened from their bony cradles, and are about to fall out.
“I’m almost there, Gladdy,” he says. “You’d better be watching. You’d better help me figure out what to do when the time comes, you old cow.”
“I am.” He answers himself in a fussy, high-pitched voice, then adds, “Don’t call me a cow.”
Another quarter-mile past the city limits brings him to a kudzu-covered 7-Eleven. It’s the first shop since the Hess Station in Howell that doesn’t look bombed out or looted. “Water. Here we go, Connie,” he mumbles in that same, wrong-sounding voice. “See? It’s all going to turn out great!”
He shuffles toward the storefront on a bent back and spry, skinny limbs, so that the overhead view of him appears crablike. He is sixty-two years old, but could pass for eighty.
His reflection, a grizzled wretch with a concave chest and hollowed eyes, moves slowly in the jagged storefront glass, but everything else is still. No crickets chirp. No children scream. It’s too quiet. He grabs his holster—empty—and remembers that he lost his gun to the bottom of the Mississippi River two days ago, and has been without water and food ever since.
“This looks like Capital-T trouble. Right here in River City,” he says in the high-pitched voice. It belongs to his wife Gladys. He’s so lonely out here that he’s invented her ghost. “Keep walking, Connie.”
He knows she’s right, but he’s so thirsty that his tongue has swollen inside his mouth, and if he doesn’t find water soon, he’ll collapse. So he sighs, angles himself between the shards of broken doorway glass, and enters the 7-Eleven.
It’s small—two narrow aisles flanked by an enclosed counter up front. Dust blankets the stock like pristine brown snow. A morbidly obese woman with a balding black widow’s peak and chipped purple nail polish stands behind the counter, holding a bloodied issue of The Enquirer. “Zombies rise up from Baton Rouge Ghetto!” the lead article screams.
“Hi,” Connie says.
The woman drops the magazine and bobbles in his direction. Something has eaten most of her abdomen and in the weeks or months since her death, the wet climate has not dried her out, but instead made a moldy home of her. He pictures lizards, crickets, even unborn children flying out from her gaping hole. Her apron, which presumably once read, Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven! now reads: Heaven-Eleven!
“Are you trying to tell me this is heaven?” Conrad asks.
She lunges at him and the force of her weight against the three-foot-high counter opens her stomach, spraying the shrunken Big Bite Hot Dogs’ spit glass and Enquirer with gangrenous green fluid.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to tease you,” he grunts as he wipes his face and pitches toward the darkened glass refrigerators in the back.
Behind him, Heaven figures it out and climbs the counter, then falls to the floor and crawls after him on a leaking stomach.
Conrad tries to pick up his pace, but he’s so dehydrated that his heart is a trapped bird in his chest, fluttering and in pain.
Do zombies eat cold meat? Do they dream of electric sheep?
“Shut up about the poor, innocent zombies and find the water, Con!” he hisses, only he’s too tired to use Gladys’ voice, so now it’s just him, talking to himself, which strikes him as sort of sad.
Behind, Heaven pushes herself to her feet. Her lips spread into a grin, and then keep spreading until they split open. The heat has turned her blood to thick soup that doesn’t run.
He hurries, but his heart’s not in it. Literally. It’s pumping spastically, as if to Muzak—his wedding song forty years ago:
With all of your faults, I love you still. It had to be you!
Lovely young Heaven lunges and swipes at him. He reaches the refrigerator, whose shelves are lined with new world gold, and lifts a gallon-sized container of Poland Spring Water. Though Heaven’s gaining, he chugs for one second . . . two . . . three . . . as he rounds the second aisle and doubles back toward the exit.
Just then, something cracks. “What the—?” he
asks.
Glass skids like sand under Heaven’s feet. To his shock, she isn’t shambling anymore; she’s running. Bad luck. Runners are rare.
“Hurry up, Con,” he pants, but he’s rooted there for a second, water in hand, as her voluminous flesh bounces and thuds. He’s wondering if maybe this is the second coming and he got left behind, because Heaven’s lips have split length-wise like a hag’s clit, and inside, all her teeth are gold.
She dives, fast this time. He doesn’t know she’s got hold of his denim jacket until she reels him into a festering embrace. She’s strong and tall—his toes don’t even touch the floor, so he uses her body as a hinge and kicks up as hard as he can. His knees slop against her chest, hooking gristle as something cracks (her ribs? her hardened kidneys?), and she drops him.
Back muscles screaming like cop sirens, he dives over the counter. His hands find the twelve-gauge on the shelf beneath the cash register, and he reaches over and presses it against Heaven’s ugly face before his physical mind ever recognizes that it’s a gun.
“I’m sorry, Heaven” he intends to say as he squeezes the trigger. But instead, Freudian slip: “I’m sorry, Delia.”
The mention of his daughter’s name trips him up. He hesitates as he shoots, and by luck or intention, she knocks the gun out of the way. He hears the sound of shattering glass, but doesn’t see what the slug hit. All he can see is Heaven as she sinks her gold teeth into his shoulder, down to the bone.
There’s no time to think. He reaches inside her open belly with both hands and pulls her spine until it cracks. She hugs him tighter and then lets go, falling backward and in half.
“I loved you where the ocean met the sky,” he tells the thing named Heaven, though he does not hear himself say those strange words. She blinks, only her eyelids aren’t long enough to cover her rot-bloated eyes. So she watches him, perhaps seeing nothing, perhaps seeing everything, as he pulls the trigger and her head explodes.
When he’s finished, he stands over her remains while his shoulder bleeds and infection worms its way through his heart and into his frontal lobe. “I’m sorry, Delia,” he tells her, “for that bloodlust. For Adam, and not testifying. For not believing you that time you called. Especially for that. I’m sorry for everything,” he says. Then he staggers out, a damned man down a long, lonely road that is almost over, toward Delia.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 31