The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  He bowed his wiry frame over the curb and counted the cobblestones. Those he could see. The foul-smelling smog, coughed daily by the Grinding Machines, swallowed the rest. He made a game of this, partly to track the thickening of the mist, partly to indulge in a number game. Perhaps this was not dignified of an aficionado of numbers and patterns, but it kept his mind busy. And in this simple act of faith that numbers always tell, he kept looking for clues wherever he could find them. There was hope in this. And it was all he could do to try to figure out The Grinding Machines, and whether the aerial release of human byproducts would ever stop.

  The bus parted the smog in bellowing clouds, clanking its way down toward them. This brought color to his pale cheeks and he cracked parched lips into a smile long overdue. He knew how excited Leyna was, and if she would experience only one thing that a child should experience, it was this show.

  “Is this it?” she squealed. “Is this it, Daddy?” She’d never ridden on a bus. He pointed to the electronic sign above the windshield that said, “THE PUPPET SHOW.”

  She stared at him in puzzlement. “I can’t read, Daddy.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “You’ve seen this word before. What am I teaching you the alphabet for?” She delegated too easily, not realizing that her smarts might one day save her. She needed to hone her skills.

  “Try harder.”

  She squinted, then burst into hops on the sidewalk. “Yes! Are we going to be able to take one home? Please, Daddy? Please?”

  “A puppet? I don’t think so, Leyna.”

  The bus screeched to a halt and they climbed up the metal steps. The stench was worse inside. The copper smell of blood and odd sweetness now mixed with the odor of sweat, feet and feces. The driver hunched over the wheel, hair in disarray, and unshaven. His bloodshot eyes ringed with skin folds the size of handbags, were testimony to eyestrain from peering into the smog. He gave them an impatient head tilt toward the back, and the doors rumbled shut behind them.

  They walked down an aisle strewn with crumpled paper, stomped Coke cans, and old beer bottles with half-torn labels. In the first seat on his right, a sizeable woman in a soiled gown cradled a baby that screamed while a streak of saliva ran down her hand. Beside her sat a small boy, the Incredible Shrinking Man in his giant overalls, hair the color of rust and wild like campfire. To his left, an old man who seemed crooked at every turn of bone held onto the handlebar in front of him with a vacant stare. He sat beside a little girl who methodically banged her foot against the metal divider. A dark substance—probably a homemade substitute for the long-gone chocolate—caked the corners of her mouth. The rest of the bus was essentially a repeat of the first row. No one stood. They passed some faces marked with apprehension and restlessness. Some peeked ahead, craning their necks.

  They insisted on glimpsing the invisible: landmarks of the old world buried in smog.

  He sighed when he found two empty seats on the back couch. They were on either side of a young woman spruced up with erotic charm from the simplest of things: a turquoise silk blouse sewn-up at several places, and white jeans still hugging her thighs but thinning and graying at the knees.

  Mark and Leyna stumbled toward her as the bus lurched forward, yet managed to keep their hands to themselves. He didn’t want to have to touch the handlebars. He was sick enough, but proven not to be contagious. He didn’t need an incurable disease he could pass on to Leyna, courtesy of a new wave of fools who tried to get sick to avoid the Grinding Machines.

  The young woman was considerate enough to skew over and make space for two adjoining seats. Mark nodded in thanks, let Leyna hop on one side, and sat between the two. He knew he didn’t have to worry about Leyna touching anything. She was well-trained.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes?” He self-consciously adjusted his shirt and counted the buttons (there were seven, as always). He’d been too weak lately to rub his fast dwindling supply of soap onto the fabric, and with renewed embarrassment, realized it was rumpled and soiled.

  Leyna startled him. “How many seats on the bus?”

  “Forty-six.” He didn’t need to count them.

  She giggled. “Are you sure? I’m gonna count them!”

  “Go ahead.” But he looked at his hands now, self-conscious about them, too. They were cadaverous. The bones popped out under the stretched skin, making ridges with too many shadows. It scared him. He still wanted to live, if only for Leyna.

  The bus bumped along, negotiating every turn with the passing shadows of leafless trees.

  “You’re okay, Leyna?”

  She frowned and slapped him on the arm. “Stop asking that!”

  He laughed. “Okay, okay.”

  “She’s truly adorable,” the woman beside him said. She was exotic, with slanted eyes and high cheekbones of Eastern ethnicity. Yet, the deeper tone of her skin and lips hinted at Latin heritage—an extraordinary mix that made her brown eyes sparkle amidst a glow of golden hazelnut. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, plump just enough to soften the curves—a jewel in a world where the young and healthy were now as rare as diamonds.

  “I can only agree,” he smiled, “but I’m her dad, you see.”

  “No, no,” she said coyly. Her hand was doing a lot of the talking. “She is beautiful. How old is she?”

  He turned to Leyna. “It’s okay,” he said. “Tell the lady.”

  She showed an open hand, fingers sprawled.

  “She’s been doing that all morning She turned five today.”

  “Happy birthday, Leyna!” She turned to Mark and extended her hand. “I’m Nathalie.”

  He took it before he had a chance to wipe off his own, wishing he could strip off its boniness along with the sweat.

  Nathalie nodded toward Leyna. “Shy?”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “And I bet,” she said, “that she can’t stop talking when she gets to know you.”

  He chuckled. “Do you have any of your own?”

  “I was too young before the Invasion. Now it would be absurd.” She recoiled, as if she realized what she’d just said. Her eyes shifted nervously between Mark and Leyna. “You seem like a good father,” she said. “She’ll be fine.”

  “It’s just a puppet show,” he said, hearing the apology in his voice. “And I’m not letting go of her if the earth splits open.”

  They rode in silence. The smog redoubled its thickness, a forewarning that they were getting close to the Grinding Machines. The bus suddenly hushed, save for the crying baby up front. Before long, he heard the Machines’ incessant screech and rumble, like un-oiled metal disks rubbing gravel. The passengers’ gazes shifted to the floor, the seats in front of them, and their hands. Mark didn’t have to see their faces. He’d seen them before.

  Eyes would glaze over, throats would gulp, probably running dry, lower lips would curl in, and hands would wring—the nervous discharges that came with dread.

  Images would run through their heads. For some, they brought guilt; for others, despair; and for the rest, sheer terror. Who would be fed into the Grinding Machines next? Were people pulled at random? Was there a pattern? And what would it feel like? For Mark, when he heard the shrill sounds of abrading machines, it was inexorably linked with images of flesh tearing, slouching and granulating, with blood running down gutters to feed a giant cauldron of human pulp. And out comes another Refurbished.

  The Grinding Machines ran in a circle that enclosed the city, with little gaps between them, so that once heading downtown, they couldn’t be avoided.

  You could shut your ears and look away, but you could never shut out their scream.

  For the better part of his life, Mark had lived in a predictable universe—one ruled by order that, if he really put his mind to it, he could glimpse right out of chaos. There were numbers, numbers everywhere. The magic of the modern world, they sparkled like gold amongst it and dispelled its mysteries. Except for the Invaders.

  An elderly
lady sat two rows up, in a seat facing them. “Does she know yet?” she said. She had breasts like two giant bullets that bounced under a loose nylon top. She gazed at him with sleepy eyes, as if the ride made her groggy. “It will happen very quickly, you know. It will be subtle.”

  This was fact and unpreventable. Yet, he couldn’t fathom why she would bring it up. It was unnecessary and obscene. The horror he felt at her callousness compelled him to look away and reach for Leyna’s hand. He didn’t have it in him to argue with the old hag.

  They only take the young and the healthy, the flyers had said. These brave messengers regularly passed new ones around, whenever they learned something of importance that they glimpsed when spying on the Machines. But lately, the messages had become ramblings, less grounded in fact, and more fashioned out of fear and despair, with a growing obsession with false prophecies.

  He retrieved a pack of Camel Lights from his shirt pocket, having long ago overcome the inhibition to smoke in public. No one cared anymore. The smog and its filth were far worse. He lit it and took a long draft, then blew the smoke as he tilted his head back, letting the calming rush take him to a better place that reminded him of a steaming bath when hot water was still available. “They’ll kill you, someday,” he said, “is what they used to say.”

  In front of them, heads bobbed in unison. The road was cratered with potholes. A man sporting a single tooth turned around and smiled at Leyna. Mark instinctively reached for her, then tried to hug her despite her complaints. She pushed him off, and he pushed back teasingly, then tickled her for good measure. She giggled and tried to run off, but Mark’s reflexes kicked in and he grabbed her wrist before she made it down the aisle. Now that she felt comfortable, she was a bundle of energy. And this only pained him. In the bright green dress she wore for the occasion, she looked like an emerald brushstroke in a dark, macabre painting.

  He felt Nathalie’s gaze on him. She searched his eyes. “I went to a show like this,” she said, “not too long ago. They’re magicians, puppeteers, professionals out of Las Vegas, traveling circuses, things like that. They know how to put on a good show. It’s admirable they do it for free now. I think it takes their minds off the Invasion. They really put their soul into it. She will like it.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it. I made dolls out of cloth and buttons, even puppets out of paper and strings for her. She’s crazy about them. She has a drawer-full now. Compared to mine—professional entertainers? Can’t wait to see her face.”

  After a while, Nathalie added, “You know, you have that look.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t mean to pry. But before the Invasion, I’d say you were a teacher, maybe a professor or something.”

  He considered this. Maybe it was his eyes, the way they pierced and pried, although he didn’t mean for them to. Maybe it was his Russian heritage, his nonchalant demeanor.

  “I’m a mathematician. A bad one at that.”

  She winced. “Why do you say that? I’m sure there’s no such thing as a bad mathematician.”

  “I failed at the only job I’ve ever had. I was part of the group at the Orion Search Center, a division of SETI. I tried every damned algorithm known to man. None of them worked.”

  “What are those? The algorithms.”

  “The thinking was that language based on mathematics is universal. We tried deciphering a pattern in the language of the Invaders. When we failed, we constructed our own message and sent it back. We never got a response. You wouldn’t believe the pressure we were under. People with machine guns guarding the exits. We had to find a way to communicate any way possible.

  “The Invaders were a serious threat.”

  He found that he was out of breath. He must’ve explained this a million times. Yet, people didn’t get it. Why would you want to talk to them? They’re evil!

  They’re killing us! They’re the devil!

  He caught a glimpse of the old woman staring at him, a smirk on her lips.

  Leyna leaned across Mark and craned her neck at Nathalie with adult seriousness. “That’s when Daddy got sick!”

  “Shhhhhh,” Mark said. “That wasn’t the question, Leyna.”

  “Sick?” Nathalie said.

  “Leyna’s been on my back about it. If you know of a doctor who’s working pro bono—hell, who’s even still working, you’ll make her happy.”

  “It’s the smog, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I hear. I know I’m not the only one.”

  “They’ve been talking to us since day one! ” They both jumped and turned to the big-breasted lady.

  She glared at them. A bump in the road loosened a white strand of hair from the bun in the back of her head. Her eyes beamed unrestrained spite, glistening deep in a halo of darkened skin. “You guys in your big towers with your big fancy computers don’t get it, do you—you don’t get it and you never will I reckon because you’re thick in the head.”

  She forced a smile. “Yeah, they’ve been talking, all right. You’re just not listening.”

  Nathalie put a hand on his arm. It felt warm, and he liked it.

  The bus came to a stop and deflated with a pshhhhhhh. They stepped out, reentering the smog, and the bus driver took the lead to guide them across the street. Mark felt apprehensive about crossing because there was no way to tell whether a vehicle might suddenly burst out of the fog and plough through them like bowling pins. Few people drove anymore, but some of the ignorant ones still did.

  Finally, a giant drape striped blue and yellow broke out of the fog. The visibility was better vertically, so that the tent seemed to climb forever, paling to nothingness a hundred feet up or so. But once inside, the air was crystal clear. Mark breathed more easily. Tendrils of fog crawled low to the ground.

  “The smog is heavy,” Nathalie said. “When there’s no wind to circulate it, it falls to the ground.”

  He felt her stare on him again, which lasted long enough that he had to acknowledge her. She pinched her lips, seeming to say, did I just say something smart? Something that might impress you?

  They squeezed between two rows of seats, trying to avoid stepping on people’s toes, and sat beside a heavyset lady who dipped enthusiastically into a pack of Doritos. She munched loudly while staring at the empty arena. He almost asked her where she’d gotten the prepackaged snack, but imagined she’d been prepared with wholesale boxes stacked to the ceiling—gathered in the few hours during the supermarket rush before they closed forever.

  He turned to Nathalie, hoping to catch her gaze on him. And he did. She had fake eyelashes, but the number of strands in the right eye didn’t match the number in the left. A silver necklace followed the curves of her breastbones with twenty-eight visible links. All this he got in a flash.

  She blinked twice as he scanned her face. Pressured to say something, he opened his mouth to speak but found he had nothing to say. She smiled weakly, eyes drifting to his lips. His mouth dried up, and his heart galloped. He felt apprehension and fear, all this mixed with an urge to kiss those full lips. There were six lone, fine hairs at the end of each eyebrow. He wondered how many crowns she had.

  “How many stripes?” Leyna caught him off guard this time, but he took a moment to let the new environment sink in. The stadium around the arena was perfectly concentric, with seats arranged so they sat exactly between the two down from them. Four hundred chairs in all. Seventeen empty seats.

  More than likely, ten buses outside. The lights dimmed, and something waddled out of hidden curtains. Seventeen camera flashes sprinkled the stadium like diamonds before stopping abruptly.

  “Forty-eight.” He yawned and she slapped his arm.

  “You cheated!” She said.

  Without looking, he grabbed her hand and squeezed it three times. I love you.

  She squeezed right back. Three times. He squeezed again, twice, then once, and once again. Tickle time!

  She giggled, then squeezed twice. No!

  “Are they going to
be like your puppets, Daddy?”

  “I doubt it.”

  As the figure advanced, still hidden by the darkness that cameras no longer obliterated with snapshots, Mark began to feel ill at ease. It was obscenely big, and dragged itself rather than walked. He’d been distracted when the cameras lit it, but the audience had apparently seen enough.

  Spotlights snapped it into reality. Mark held his breath, as much for himself as for Leyna. What he saw was grotesque beyond description: a bloated lump of flesh, shaped to give a passing impression of an obese human figure, beamed at the audience. It was a thirty-foot tall puppeteer carrying two smaller versions of itself, two live fleshy horrors suspended on strings like greased dough balls. All three creatures were awkwardly designed in the crude human form typical of the Refurbished: two glistening puffy cheeks, a beaked protrusion carved in the likelihood of a nose. They leered with lips the color of liver through a jagged hole cut to give a rudimentary semblance of teeth.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Nathalie muttered, “but that’s not the show I expected.”

  He didn’t want to look at her, see the fright on her face, the validation of his own.

  “They can come into our houses if they want,” he whispered so Leyna wouldn’t hear. “They can grab us off the streets. Why the charade?”

  Mark finally found the strength to check on Leyna, whose face had gone expressionless, lips slightly apart, gaze darting across the creature. He scanned the tent, hoping to glimpse signs of protests, but found only confused fascination. Clearly, no one knew whether to stay or leave. Mark sat on the edge of his seat, heart pounding, ready to spring and run the moment things turned ugly.

  On closer inspection, he could now easily pick out several of the traditional Refurbished. Like the giant and his puppets, they were parodies of the human shape. They sat there, inconspicuous in their immobility. In the early part of the Invasion, they’d been chased, killed and burned, but their numbers only grew. Finally, they stopped appearing altogether. But here they were, insidious as ever, partaking in a silent chorus of open mouths that doughnuted their faces.