The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5

by Bentley Little

  But as the minutes passed, the clarity and common sense of those first waking moments slipped away. She showered quickly, then dressed in front of the big mirror in her bedroom, glad for the first time that she was a little heavier than ideal. It would make the weight loss that much harder to notice. She could live on honey for a long time. And she could nurse Carrie back to health with it. No one needed to know how she did it, but everyone would know she had.

  She stopped at a 7-Eleven on her way to work, running in and out of the rain as quickly as possible. Death was everywhere in there, lined up, on display. It made her feel as if something terrible was about to happen.

  At the hospital she found a patient advisory waiting in her email. She opened it, her hand trembling on the mouse. During the night Carrie had suffered a seizure and then a mild heart attack. She was stable now, but still in and out of consciousness. Her parents had been contacted and authorized tube feeding, which had been installed. If Carrie didn’t regain consciousness by that afternoon she’d be transferred to a nearby hospice.

  Melissa grabbed the bag she’d brought with her and hurried up to Carrie’s room. It was just after six, the halls still half-lit and quiet. In another hour they’d be alive with morning sounds of wheeled carts and girls’ voices, but for now they were dark and mostly deserted. Melissa slipped into Carrie’s room unnoticed.

  Even in the dark the change in Carrie was obvious. She lay slightly askance in the bed, her arms loosely crossed over her bony hips. Her eyes were closed but her mouth hung open, pulled back from teeth that seemed too large. A thin tube snaked from behind one ear and into a nostril, carrying pale yellow liquid to her stomach.

  Someone had loosened her gown and pulled it away, exposing the sharp angles of her shoulders. Electrodes studded her chest and led to a heart monitor standing guard on the far side of the bed. The machine tracked the sluggish beats of Carrie’s heart in silent pulses of green light. The TV, thankfully, was off.

  Melissa sat down next to the bed and whispered Carrie’s name, hoping she would stir. She said it again, louder. Carrie’s eyelids fluttered and finally opened.

  “I know,” Melissa said, smoothing limp hair away from her forehead. Carrie’s eyes focused on her the tiniest bit. “I understand. But I found something.” She reached into the bag at her feet and pulled out a jar of honey, holding it up so Carrie could see it in the gloom.

  “It’s not dead,” she whispered. “Nothing dies for it.”

  Carrie lifted a hand and slid her fingers down the jar’s front. Melissa removed the top, suddenly wishing she’d thought to bring a spoon. She searched the dark room for something she could use, but found nothing, so she dipped her index finger into the jar then brought it to Carrie’s lips.

  Carrie’s tongue poked out, dry as a cat’s. She took the honey from Melissa’s finger, savoring its sweetness, and Melissa wondered how long it had been since Carrie had tasted anything.

  Melissa dipped her finger into the jar again. This time Carrie suckled it like a child, hungrily cleaning every trace of the honey from it. Melissa recoated her finger and offered it again, enjoying the warmth and busy sucking of Carrie’s mouth as she licked and swallowed.

  They continued this way, rain pattering against the window, thunder rattling its frame, Melissa feeding Carrie, until a quarter of the jar was gone. Carrie finally pulled away, gasping and satisfied, then asked for water. Melissa poured some into a cup, and held it for her. Carrie drank, slurping and still breathing hard, as greedily as she’d taken the honey. When she was finished she dropped her head back to the pillow, gratitude shining in her eyes.

  It was brighter in the room now, the color of things starting to appear in the morning light. Carrie opened her mouth to speak. At the same moment, the heart monitor began beeping like an alarm clock.

  Melissa jumped at the sudden intrusion. The hospital staff would arrive in seconds. She leaned in to hear what Carrie wanted to say, but all she could make out were the words “everything” and “everywhere.”

  Nurses bustled into the room, turning on lights and making Melissa wince at the abrupt brightness. They traded looks with Melissa and then each other but said nothing. The on-call physician joined them a few moments later.

  Melissa shrank into a corner of the room and watched as they surrounded Carrie. A nurse pulled Carrie’s gown away, revealing deflated breasts and ribs like the bars of a cage. Someone began CPR, blowing into Carrie’s mouth and pumping her chest with so much force Melissa feared it would collapse.

  An orderly wheeled a crash cart into the room. The doctor gelled the paddles and pressed them to Carrie’s chest, then someone shouted, “Clear!” Carrie’s hips rose off the mattress again and again and again. Each time the heart monitor momentarily ceased its alarm, then took it back up again a few seconds later.

  Melissa counted the attempts to revive her. At eight everyone took a step back from the bed and looked at one another, making the decision. She wanted to ask them to keep trying, just one more time, and if that didn’t work, another and another. She could save Carrie. She knew how. She just needed a little more time.

  The physician nodded. A nurse glanced at her watch and called the time of death at 6:39 a.m.

  Melissa stared in disbelief, her gaze following the doctor and nurses as they left the room. The orderly packed away the cart and wheeled it out of the room. A few minutes later two nursing assistants brought in a gurney with a basin and some linens on top. Melissa watched, still in the corner, as they cleaned Carrie’s face, her arms and legs and chest, and then her privates, with washcloths and towels, chatting the whole time as though they were doing dishes. When they were finished they lifted Carrie onto the gurney, draped a sheet over her and tucked it in, then fell silent as they took her away.

  Melissa turned from the empty room. She dropped her head into the corner and allowed the tears to come, stifling her sobs with a sticky knuckle that still tasted of honey.

  It was possible she’d contributed to Carrie’s death, and every time she considered this, guilt tore a fresh wound in her chest. What was certain, however, was that she had been involved, drawn to Carrie’s side at precisely the right time, the way predator and prey are drawn together at the moment of death. There to witness her end and hear those enigmatic last words.

  Try as she might, it was impossible now to isolate those words from the noise and chaos crowding her memory, to give them some new meaning or put them together in a way that made sense.

  Everything, she’d said. Everywhere.

  Melissa wiped her eyes and faced the room again. The honey still sat on the nightstand, unnoticed and undisturbed. Melissa walked over to it, still shaking inside and out, and put the cap back on, then dropped it into the bag and left Carrie’s room.

  The rain had stopped. Now sun streamed in through the clinic’s large windows, falling onto the hallway floors in bright rectangles. Once inside her office she e-mailed her supervisor, explaining what had happened and requesting the day off.

  She drove home in gathering traffic, thinking about everything and everywhere. Each time a restaurant or convenience store appeared in her windshield she looked away, concentrating instead on the other stores lining the way back to her apartment.

  Furniture, gas, clothing.

  She unlocked her door and went from room to room, drawing the curtains, plunging the apartment into darkness. She entered the bathroom and began filling the tub, then undressed, leaving her clothes in a heap on the floor. When the tub was full she sat down in it, glad for the punishment of the too-hot water.

  She sank to her nose, her skin prickling from the heat. Everything. Everywhere. She stared at the wall in front of her, turning Carrie’s last words over and over in her mind, hoping to fit them together in some new way that would reveal Carrie’s message. Her final secret.

  Melissa let her eyes roam over the bathroom. She looked at everything, everywhere. Plastic bottles of shampoo and body lotions clustered together on a shel
f above her. Towels and washcloths filled a rack above the toilet. A small arrangement of flowers sat atop one corner of the vanity.

  The flowers were dried.

  She remembered buying them fresh at a farmer’s market one sunny Saturday morning, shortly after she’d started at the hospital. She’d tied the stems together, then hung them upside down, to go stiff and shriveled like something left in the desert to die.

  The flowers were dead.

  Dead when she’d brought them home and even deader now, sticking out of their vase like a clutch of dusty green skeletons, their arms and heads hanging down.

  She looked again at the bathroom, and shivered despite the hot water.

  The vanity was made of wood, of flesh stripped from trees that had lived and grown and died.

  The towels and shower curtain were cotton, torn from plants that had produced it using only sun and water, each one alive, then snuffed out as soon as the fibers were harvested.

  Every one of her shampoos and lotions, the ingredients of each, had their origins in the death of living things. Even the bottles—all of them plastic, produced from oil, borne from animals and plants that had died and rotted and been transformed by the darkness of untold millions of years.

  She crossed her arms, pressing them against her breasts. She drew an unsteady breath from the steamy air, then closed her eyes and sank down into the water until it covered her head, squeezing her eyes shut against it and the thoughts tumbling through her mind like great boulders.

  It took so much death to keep the world alive. The living world’s appetite for it was infinite.

  Wood, cotton, oil.

  All of it. Dead.

  Everything. Everywhere.

  The Steel Church

  by Charles Colyott

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

  Pro patria mori.

  -Wilfred Owen

  The siege continued on long past dusk, its constant strobe and battery and chaos becoming nothing more than an accompaniment to the ceremony at hand—the daily memorial. The clank and thrum of steel on steel echoed in the high ceilings of the chapel as the organized hordes entered. Company by company, the soldiers filed rigidly in and stood at attention before their assigned tables. Fresh from the front lines and still bearing the marks of battle upon grim faces and outdated, obsolete body armor, the men and women of the 14th battalion, tired, cold and hungry, stared unflinchingly at the faces of their fallen comrades upon the walls of the Steel Church.

  Unlike the stained glass used in places of worship in the Old Days—windows long since destroyed by the Faithless—these walls, built solely of transparent plasteel tubing, depicted no gentle doves, no saints, no all-knowing saviors. These walls, every soldier knew, were their future. From chutes built into the trenches, the dead were deposited only to collect here, in the walls of the church; a murky sludge of blood and dirt, intact cadavers and disembodied chunks which drifted lazily through the pipes and columns of the place. Friends, lovers, and family—soldiers all—here to be remembered a final time.

  The Chaplain, a triple-amputee in a barely functional spider-walker, mounted the pulpit amid the hisses and whirrs of his robotic transport. With a perpetual scowl of scar tissue marring the lower right quadrant of his face, the Chaplain regarded the ranks of warriors before him. The ritual was old, older by far than the Chaplain, and had long since lost its pleasantries.

  “Sit,” the Chaplain barked, and the soldiers filling the church did.

  As the lectern computer loaded the names of the day’s fallen, the Chaplain gazed up at the razor-edged cross suspended above him that gave the church its name. Reflected in the symbol he saw bits of heroes, pieces of those who’d given their all for The Father. The sight always strengthened his faith, seeing them there within the cross. A small beep from the console informed him the list was ready.

  He began reading the names, only twelve hundred today, and ignored the whining growl of his stomach. Since retiring from the field and taking on the mantle of Chaplain, he’d become soft; pressing the plastic valve of his colostomy bag deeper into his stomach to deter any further distractions, the Chaplain read on.

  “Frater Samuel O’Reilly, go with God…Soror Stephanie Ingraham, go with God…”

  He continued down the list and ignored the sounds of the repository behind him. As each name was read aloud, the corresponding soldier’s dogtags, crucifixes, and any personal effects fell into the processing bin in the front of the lectern for washing, sorting, and eventual redistribution. When he’d reached the last fifty names, the combine engines fired up with a roar. Upon the recitation of the final name on the screen, the Chaplain announced, “You may rise.”

  The soldiers stood.

  With a nod from the Chaplain, they formed lines at the sides and back of the enormous church. And as the valves opened and the combines began to grind, the Chaplain said, “As our Lord sayeth in the days of old, ‘You do this in memory of me.’ And so we do. But not in memory of Him, for He is with us always. Tonight we do this in memory of our brethren. We do this to take in and accept their strengths. We do this to shit out their weaknesses.”

  He watched as the plasteel pipes vomited forth frothy sludge into waiting bowls. At fifteen second intervals the jets ceased, the full bowls were removed to the tables, and a new soldier, with a new bowl, would step into place. The years had honed the proceedings down to a quiet, efficient, operation—far smoother and, in the Chaplain’s mind, far better than the ruckus his father had told him about from back when he was a cadet, back before the siege began.

  When the ranks had all returned to their seats, Frater Coulter brought the Chaplain his bowl. He prayed silently over it, confident that the rest of the battalion was doing the same, and, upon completion, opened his eyes and said, “Amen.”

  Grasping the spoon with the three fingers of his remaining hand, the Chaplain set to, shoveling the gruel into his wounded mouth without really tasting it. He’d blocked out that sense years before a Faithless shell took down his chopper at the Battle of Columbus. His heavy-lidded eyes glanced out over the troops; he knew the newbies from the vets on sight.

  The newbies picked out the flecks of bone. They drew the strings of tendon from their mouths and stared with disbelieving eyes. They lost their stomachs on the steel floors. In each memorial, a few of the kids inevitably had to be taken to the field hospital. They were too green; they didn’t know what it was, yet, to be hungry. They were wasteful.

  They would learn.

  The vets, on the other hand, scraped their bowls clean and asked for seconds they knew they couldn’t have. Casualties were down; they were holding their position firm and the tide was turning, but it was bad for morale at mess time. Things would have to change—soon—or it would start to get ugly again.

  Some tastes, once acquired, were hard to shake.

  When the memorial was complete—the bowls placed in a receptacle for washing, the soldiers ushered out and back to the field, the plasteel pipes sluiced until they shone clear and clean once more—the Chaplain remained, alone, in the Steel Church. He looked at the cruel beauty of the cross and the battered, battle-scarred flag that hung beneath it. It still held together well, despite its injuries; the Chaplain figured they had that much in common.

  He saluted the two beloved symbols with his gnarled hand and turned (after a bit of fiddling with his spider-walker’s wiring) to leave. He belched once, loudly, and grimaced at the taste of gastric juice. He swallowed hard, wondering idly if the juice had been his own. The robotic legs of the walker sputtered and hissed and clanked upon the metal floor, echoing slightly in the vast and empty hall.

  It sounded as if the barrage outside had more or less ended for the night.

  The Chaplain whistled Taps as he rode back to his quarters.

  It is sweet and right to die for your country.

>   The Apocalypse Ain’t So Bad

  by Jeff Strand

  If you ask me, people are unnecessarily gloomy about the end of the world. And that starts with calling it “the end of the world.” It’s not like the planet exploded or cracked in half or melted or anything like that. The world itself is perfectly fine—it’s just that almost everybody is dead.

  Here’s the thing: We all know that it was a devastating tragedy. Why keep bringing that up? Anybody you talk to, you literally can’t have more than fifteen seconds of conversation before they’ve gotta switch the topic to the apocalypse. I’m not suggesting that it isn’t a major news story; I’m just saying that it doesn’t have to be the only news story. Know what I’m saying? It’s been almost four months.

  Believe me, I’ve got plenty to whine about. I’m pretty much on my own at this point. For a short while after humanity’s 99.7% demise, I was traveling with a woman named Cyndi. Unfortunately, I sort of botched the timing on bringing up the whole “Hey, we’ve gotta repopulate the earth!” topic, and I found myself surviving on my own.

  Sure, the mutants are a problem. (And, yes, they’re mutants—it seems like some people want to call any non-verbal human with a messed-up face a “zombie.”) But they go down pretty quick with a shot to the head, and c’mon, who among us thought we’d get the chance to open fire on real people without it being a felony?

  Now, some survivors did have to defend themselves against mutated friends and/or family, and there’s no question that it must’ve sucked. If you’re one of them, you have the right to be mopey. That’s not who I’m complaining about. It’s the folks who had to shoot three or four mutant strangers, yet are acting like they had to drown their own mother in a bathtub. Three words: Get. Over. It.