The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  You can’t believe that you’ve been singled out like this. Plenty of people passing through the gate look more like terrorists and mad bombers than you do. People with scraggly beards and brown skin and beady black eyes and suicidally dour worry lines. People with bulky outfits and funny hats and bottles of God knows what kind of liquid. Compared to them, you might as well be Uncle Sam himself. You’re just an average Joe. A regular guy. It’s not fair.

  “Shoes off,” Juicy Fruit commands. You lift one leg at a time and try to control your balance as you slide off your sneakers. The concrete is as cold and hard as a prison cell floor when you step down on it.

  One of the guards inspects your Nikes. He takes a deep sniff of one and you laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” White Bread asks, patting your kidney with his wand.

  Your eyebrows furrow. You see a bearded man with a turban stroll through the security gate. “Nothing…I just can’t believe you’re wasting all this effort on me when clearly there are others who…”

  White Bread pokes you this time and then turns you around so you are facing him and the other guards. “You have a grudge against the other passengers?” he asks.

  Your feet feel cold and bony on the floor. “No, I just have a plane to catch. And I honestly don’t know why you’ve stopped me when there are plenty of people just traipsing right on through the gate who clearly fit the terrorist profile.”

  “The TSO does not practice racial profiling anymore,” Juicy Fruit says, that one-sided smile of hers lifting high enough to show the black-and-pink lining of her upper gums.

  “Nope,” White Bread confirms. “But you sure do think you’re special, Mister. And special people are our business.” He hands his paddle over to an officer on his left and then pulls on a pair of latex gloves. Every prison movie you’ve ever seen flashes in your mind. But he doesn’t ask you to bend over and instead moves both of his hands toward your face. “Now open wide,” he says, as if he were some kind of military dentist.

  You clamp shut. It’s instinct. The idea of having his fascist fingers probing around in your mouth makes you gag a little.

  “Sir, I am just asking you to open your mouth. We need to check…”

  You grind your teeth and snap your head side-to-side to mime your reply: No. Fucking. Way.

  White Bread flexes his hands in front of your neck like he’ll strangle you. You raise your chin defiantly, and he eventually shrugs. You detect a little smile, in fact. “Fine, we’ll play this your way.”

  Juicy Fruit waves at a gladiator-type nearby, sporting a Kevlar vest and an over-the-shoulder rifle. The gladiator swizzles a toothpick between his lips and sizes you up with the pencil tip-thin pupils of his steely blue eyes. “What’ve we got now?”

  His buzz cut seems to bristle when you grumble at him from behind your compressed lips.

  “A defier,” Juicy Fruit says, as if it were a real word. “He set off the alarm twice, but nothing turns up when we wand him. We performed a full pat-down and shoe check, but he’s refusing oral inspection.”

  “Is that so?” Gladiator asks, his face an inch from your nose. His breath smells of stale wood and artificial mint and it even burns your eyes a little. But you’re not going to open your mouth. You’d rather miss your flight than be violated by these human robots.

  Gladiator smirks. Then he looks over at White Bread and winks.

  Before you know it, you’re being lifted off your feet and ushered behind another partition—an opaque pane of frosted bulletproof glass.

  A place where there will be no witnesses.

  You break your silent rebellion. “Okay, okay, you can check my mouth. My flight’s leaving soon and I want to just get this over with.”

  They ignore you, carrying you toward a darkened doorway with a sign overhead that reads DEEP INSPECTION.

  “What the hell?”

  You receive a kidney punch for that one as you pass through the entrance, the hands beneath your underarms pinching you tight as the group of thugs lead you through a twisting corridor of partitions. You grunt and struggle, but then stiffen as you detect the sounds of other people up ahead.

  You hear plaintive cries. The screams of children and grown men. And behind them: electric sizzles and spits.

  You make a final turn and enter a room the size of a theater, illuminated with so much overhead fluorescence that it takes a minute for your eyes to adjust and recognize the nightmare in store for you.

  For a second, it looks like some kind of factory floor. Shockingly shiny aluminum tables, dress-right-dress, fill the room. Strange machines pivot over them, with robot arms that pinch down at the bodies tied down on the tables. The tabletops are angled so that the feet are in the air and the heads are almost upside down, mouths twisted in agony. Pistons and tubes and wires dangle everywhere. You see sparks. Uniformed men and women operate each station, anonymous behind their hospital masks, overseeing monitors and keyboards beside the horrifying machines.

  There are at least fifty of them.

  Oddly, there are wide windows of glass that reveal the expansive field of the airport beyond. A plane takes off, as if leaving all of this madness behind. It seems unholy for so much mechanized evil to be so visible, so out in the open like this— and yet at the same time so invisible, so ignored. How can they get away with this?

  You cry out for help and White Bread groans. “Oh, why don’t you just do us all a favor and go back to playing mum?”

  And you do, because you know that no one will come to your rescue. There are plenty of other people crying out for help and mercy and God, but no one seems to be paying attention. The machines bob and weave like you’re on some kind of science fiction movie set. This place functions in such well-oiled harmony that it has obviously been in operation for a very long time. So you know there is no hope for rescue. You focus your attention on identifying an escape route. But there is none. The only way out is the way you came in, and there’s nothing out there but more guards with guns and ammunition.

  “Over there’s a free table,” someone says behind you and then you see what he is talking about: an empty operating table near the far wall awaits. A man with large glasses perched above his hospital mask stands nearby, tapping keys on a console.

  As they lead you toward it, you scan the agonized faces of others who are being probed and lanced and photographed and electrocuted. The people are from every walk of life, every culture, every age, and every race. Unified in pain.

  And, given the screams you hear, you are surprised to see so little blood. But there’s plenty of scarring and bruising and burn marks to make up for it. Men and women—some of them young children or geriatric grandparents—writhe around you like insects crisping under a magnifying glass.

  “What the hell is all this?” you ask, but they ignore you, stripping your clothes off of you like they are tailoring a department store mannequin. Then they lash your torso down on a cold table with a black ribbon of thick Velcro.

  “Open wide,” White Bread teases again as the officers pull your legs apart. The ankles are strapped awkwardly to the table.

  The head of your table drops down, angling, lifting your legs above your head. Disoriented by this, you gaze out the large windows and see a plane take off and it looks like it is descending into a dark pool of night outside, rather than lifting up into the heavens. Then all light blots out as the robotic arms whir into place before you. The rubber tubes that run back from its fingers begin to jitter and chug like a cyborg’s circulatory system.

  It angles and moves closer toward your face. A needle slides out from the center of its palm.

  You writhe and tug and scream.

  And before you know it, it’s already pulling back away from your neck, trickling a few hot droplets of blood onto your chin.

  You have no idea whether it has taken a sample or has injected you with something of its own.

  A second arm swings down out of nowhere and slowly streams a bar of light across y
our body, Xerox style, beginning at your feet, then washing over your groin, then over your chest, the table moving along with its actions automatically in sync. You can feel the blood droplets on your body fizzling dry beneath its beam. When the lamp reaches your head you’re blinded.

  You feel the light switch off. You blink as shapes and shadows slowly form around you. You hear a scream from nearby while someone else says something about a sandwich.

  Then something pinches the nape of your neck. You feel a metal mouth gnawing its way into the back of your skull. The metal clicks, pops and scrapes between your ears, behind your head, and the itchy foreign wetness you feel sliding around beneath you is maddening.

  But you’re still alive.

  And you hear the man operating the keyboard beside you call over White Bread. “Confirm,” he says.

  You can only see hazy shadows of form, but White Bread looks down at you, and you can tell he’s grinning. “Are you sure?” he asks his cohort through the side of his mouth.

  “He’s a niner-niner,” the faceless man replies somewhere beside you. “He’s got the gene.”

  “I’m not a freaking terrorist!” you scream, struggling in your bonds. “I’m an American citizen!”

  White Bread chuckles while you finish screaming. “Why do they always say that?” he asks the man beside him.

  The faceless man peers down at you like a doctor. “There’s no such thing as terrorism, sir,” he says, swinging a new robot arm down in front of your face. “An ism is a belief. A mere worldview.” He adjusts a dial. “And worldviews are always colored by genetics.” He blinks twice as he takes a moment to size up your confusion. “To put it simply, sir, you have what we call the Defiance gene.”

  “The what?” You feel your blood boil. “There’s no such thing!”

  “Of course you’d say that, sir,” he replies. “You Defiers always disagree. It’s in your nature.” He blinks again. “We’re not going to argue with you.”

  White Bread is again requesting that you open your mouth. Only he’s doing it politely this time.

  You don’t defy him. You obey, as if that meant something. You drop your jaw.

  And then the machine moves forward like a fist that fingers your mouth open even wider than you thought possible with its sharp metal hooks. Seven-tined forks clamp grizzly into your tongue and you bite down on them. You puzzle over the flavor, which doesn’t taste like blood so much as hand sanitizer.

  It’s the last thing you’ll ever taste.

  Obsidian Sea

  by Kurt Kirchmeier

  Trammel caressed the trigger of the flare gun, once again resisting the urge to squeeze it true. Although the sea itself had settled, the storm-kneaded waters flattening out like so much cerulean dough, a thousand black spheres continued to bob in his periphery, riding the waves like onyx balloons set adrift. Some had swelled to the size of bowling balls, while others remained no bigger than the hailstones Trammel had initially mistaken them for. He wondered now about the lightning, if perhaps he’d mistaken that, too.

  For all his panicked rowing, for all his grunting and splashing and adrenaline-fed desperation, the mysterious spheres were no further away at present than they had been at the very outset. It was as though they were attached to the raft by tethers unseen, held in place by forces ineffable.

  Well past the point of exhaustion now, Trammel simply slouched in the stern and waited, his arms and his back aching from exertion, the cool evening wind made cooler by the sheen of sweat on his skin.

  Spent thunderheads patched the horizon like oblongs of rust; the ochre sun had begun to set, following the path his thirty-foot trawler had taken just a short while before.

  Empathy. Trammel had named the boat thus to spite his father, who had attempted to impress upon his only son the belief that such a trait would get him nowhere. It seemed the old man had had the right of it, after all.

  More than anything, Trammel had hoped to leave behind him sons and daughters of his own, children to carry his name as well as his spirit, but with his future hinging on the results of the single flare, of one small distress signal loosed at an endless sky, the idea of a living legacy was beginning to seem unlikely at best.

  Unlikely, but not impossible; as tempting as it was to swear off patience and just let fly the brilliant projectile now, to follow up on the whistling shot with one last prayer, Trammel knew he’d have a better chance of being spotted after dark. He shuddered at the thought of a whole night spent surrounded, a whole night spent listening to the eerie hum.

  He’d failed to notice the monotone sound through the duration of his failed escape, but now that he’d become aware of it, he could hear nothing else. Low and deep and continuous, it brought to mind meditating Buddhists as heard from a distance. The Zen analogy, however, ended there.

  He cupped his ears and took a deep breath, expelled the air from his lungs in a long steady stream. How the myriad globes could even float was beyond him, for they’d descended upon his trawler with a weight and fury exceeding grapeshot, puncturing the roof of the cabin, perforating both the deck and the hull. The sound had been deafening, a million miniature fists pounding on wood and fiberglass and cold Atlantic water, the hail and the spray and the fragments reducing visibility to virtually nil.

  That he himself had somehow passed through the carnage unscathed seemed nothing short of miraculous. It was almost as if the violent rain of black had avoided him intentionally, as if it had made a conscious, premeditated even, decision to keep him alive. Why this would be didn’t bear contemplation.

  Every so often, a dorsal fin could be seen amidst the many orbs, a curious knife in the water, but never did the sharks stay long; nor did any of them see fit to drag one of the unearthly objects down for a little taste. Hungry enough to investigate, yet too wary to eat—probably not a portentous sign, thought Trammel.

  The raft continued to rock, seconds turning into minutes and minutes giving way to hours. Darkness settled about the sea like a blanket, the crescent moon sheltering behind a thick bank of ominous cloud. The water was glass now, but no less sinister for all its lack of turbulence.

  The spheres continued to encircle the raft, staring up from the midnight broth like a thousand obsidian eyes. Still no sign of another ship. Still no sign of the shore.

  Trammel blinked hard and rubbed his eyes. Perhaps it was too much sun and too little water, or maybe it was the hours of physical exertion and compound stress finally catching up to him; whatever the case, the strange hum soon began to sound almost tranquil, a morbid sort of lullaby.

  For a while he fought his weariness, frequently splashing water in his face and occasionally screaming into the empty night, but eventually the strain on his lids became too great.

  Even in sleep, escape remained elusive.

  Trammel’s eyes had scarcely closed in earnest when he sensed a sudden otherness inside his mind. Like sentient probes, they assailed him, every memory they touched given life in the form of a dream. Lucid throughout, Trammel wondered what it was they were doing, what they were searching for.

  They lingered long in his childhood, corkscrewing through recollected scenes like wisps of curious smoke, pausing now and again as though to examine the nuances of human interaction, the social hierarchy of man. And through the course of the million-shot slideshow grew an air of studious zeal and grim intent.

  Trammel awoke to the sound of splashing.

  Despite the absence of the moon, he could still make out those spheres that were nearest the raft, though no longer were they spheres at all. The once-black shells were now fleshy and misshapen, and contorting in a way that bespoke of life within. Life attempting to get out. Some bore singular arms at either side, groping hands paddling them in hopeless circles. Others raked at the waves with two.

  One by one, they approached, the sickly white and almond tanned, the olive and the brown, skin-sacks of forming tissue and shifting cartilage, all of them flailing and thrashing at the tar-black w
aters, some with fully-formed fingers and some with only stumps.

  Brandishing an oar like a club, Trammel reared back and swung at the first one to reach the raft. The oar connected with a sound like a tenderizer put to meat, the sickening wetness accompanied by the unmistakable pop of broken bones. The fleshy surface gave like an oversized grape, blood oozing from orifices that might otherwise have become nostrils and a mouth.

  New hands clawed at his ankles, partially formed heads lolling on necks not yet strong enough to fully support them. Here and there a wide and searching eye could be seen, the sickle moon, exposed now, reflecting in rheumy stares.

  Again and again the oar fell, but there were simply too many of them. Adrenaline soon yielded to exhaustion; Trammel collapsed to his knees. And saw a light in his periphery.

  There, in the distance, a panning beacon. The shore.

  He scrambled for the flare gun, found it within the grasp of pale fingers, being dragged overboard. A well-placed kick freed it from imminent submersion. Trammel quickly took it up and aimed it skyward, releasing its charge into the darkness.

  Light washed across the ocean’s surface like a veneer of shimmering crimson, bringing the countless beings into sharp relief. There followed an awful epiphany as Trammel looked out upon a living legacy gone horribly wrong. At once he understood why they’d so thoroughly explored his mind while he slept, why they had plumbed the depths of his experience.

  They’d been searching for a suitable form, a subtle means by which to commence their invasion.

  Many of them were whole now, arms propelling them toward the shore. Children. They were becoming children.

  The Living World

  by C. Michael Cook

  Melissa emptied the cupboards and then the refrigerator. She put everything in the trash because she couldn’t imagine putting any of it in her mouth.

  Cereal, eggs, meat. Especially the meat.

  She scanned the countertops, looking for anything she might have missed. She found the honey sitting next to the stove, and almost threw it away before realizing it was okay.