Aftertaste

by Kevin J. Anderson

  He pushed the door open. An empty room. Another thump, the muffled sounds louder. Nick followed them to a locked closet. Another werewolf-enhanced twist and the door opened. Inside, a young man lay bound and gagged on the floor. Seeing Nick, his eyes rolled wildly.

  Nick motioned him to silence, then pulled off the gag.

  “Thank God,” the young man gasped. “I didn’t think anyone would ever hear me. You must be a—”

  He said a word Nick didn’t recognize. Probably the Latinized name for half demons with hearing powers. Reese did say the brothel catered to supernaturals.

  “It’s okay,” Nick said as he snapped the ropes. “I’m going to get you out—”

  “No!” The guy grabbed his wrist. “The girls. The whores. They’re vetala.”

  “If that’s some kind of zombie, I already know that.”

  “It’s a demi-demon that possesses bodies of the recently dead.”

  Which explained the non-rotting, Nick supposed.

  The young man continued. “I knew what they were as soon as I got here. I’m a necromancer. I can recognize the dead. I confronted the lady in charge and all of a sudden, they swarmed me and locked me in there.”

  “Okay, but you’re out now. So come—”

  “My friend. They took him to the basement for some kind of ritual. That’s why they’re closed tonight. We need to get him out.”

  Nick knew he wasn’t considered the brightest guy in the Pack. Clay was a freaking genius and Elena was damned smart, too, so he never tried to compete, just sat back and let them come up with the plans. But he wasn’t dumb. Or, at least, not dumb enough to try handling this on his own.

  He clapped the young man on the back. “Don’t worry.” He took out his cell to call Karl. “I’ll get help—”

  The young man’s eyes bugged. “There’s no time for that. Don’t you get it? My friend is about to be slaughtered in some kind of demonic ritual.”

  “Then we’ll stall it until my friends arrive.” Nick started dialing.

  The young man knocked the phone from his hand. “You aren’t making this easy, are you?” His eyes glowed orange and his voice changed. “I want your body.”

  Considering where they were, there was a brief moment when Nick thought, “Whoa, sorry, that’s not my thing.” Then he realized, given the whole zombie/vetala/demi-demon issue—and the glowing orange eyes—that probably wasn’t what the guy meant.

  A floorboard squeaked behind Nick, and the stench of rotting flesh wafted past. He spun as three young women slid into the room. The first looked normal enough, her skin just starting to gray. The second’s face was covered in blackened boils that bubbled and burst. The third was barely more than a walking skeleton, flesh sloughing off with every step. All three wore silk negligees, thongs, garters and stockings, presenting an image that ensured Nick was not going to be enjoying the Victoria’s Secret catalog for a very long time.

  He backed up to the window, watching their outstretched nails and remembering the zombie scratch that nearly cost Clay an arm. When he reached the window and looked down, though, he saw two more zombie hookers waiting below in the yard.

  Shit! Had Reese and Noah gotten away? He should have told Reese to call Karl and tell him where they were before he checked out the noise.

  “Look, whatever’s going on here, it’s your business,” Nick said. “I’m just going to leave and pretend I didn’t see anything—”

  “Did I mention I want your body?” the young man said.

  “This body?” Nick said. “It’s a lot older than you think. I’m a—”

  “Werewolf.” One of the girls licked her lips with a blackened tongue. “We know. That means your body is in very good condition. You and your friends picked a perfect night to visit. We were just beginning to gather fresh vessels. They last a long time, but not indefinitely. We’ll take yours and the handsome young Australian’s. The little one is too young, but we will kill him quickly. Mercifully.”

  Nick hit the man first. A lightning punch to the throat took him down, and he stayed down, the demi-demon abandoning its host. On to the graying girl, who was already running at him, shrieking. A blow to the stomach doubled her over. He grabbed her hair and snapped her neck. When he looked up, the other two were gone, leaving a trail of rotted flesh in their wake.

  Nick exited out the window. Only two zombies down there. As he landed, they rushed him. He took the first out with two quick blows. The second ran off. When the first zombie was dead—or dead again—he dropped her and turned . . .

  Zombies stepped through the hedges, surrounding him. Six of them. All in lingerie and varying degrees of decomposition.

  A figure raced through an opening in the hedge. Reese. The young man ran to Nick’s side and flipped around to cover his back.

  “Noah?” Nick said.

  “Safe.”

  The zombies began to circle.

  “You need to watch their—”

  “Nails, I know.” Reese lowered his voice. “Where’s the necromancer?”

  “Huh?”

  “Zombies are controlled by a necro. Where’s—?”

  Reese stopped as they spotted Angelica hidden in the shadows.

  “I got her,” Reese said. “Cover me.”

  Nick raced after him, knocking zombies aside as they charged. But not many charged. Not as many as should have, if Angelica could order them to guard her. Nick realized it just as Reese grabbed Angelica. Reese already had his hands around the woman’s neck. Her eyes flashed orange, then emptied as the demi-demon left her.

  “Goddamn it!” Reese said, dropping the corpse.

  “The old woman,” Nick said as he surveyed the zombies, closing in on them again. “Darlene. Where’s—?”

  A white-haired figure stepped through the gate, lips moving, hands fluttering. The zombies shifted forward, rumbling and hissing.

  A shadow appeared behind the old woman. Noah knocked her to the ground. His hands shot up to snap her neck. The zombies turned and rushed him.

  “No!” Nick yelled.

  He raced over, shoving zombies out of the way. Killing the undead was one thing. Killing a living person—deservedly or not—wasn’t something the boy needed on his conscience.

  Nick grabbed the old woman away from Noah. A quick wrench broke her neck. The zombies hesitated. They didn’t evacuate their shells, though. They just watched him, as if confused.

  Because they weren’t zombies. Shit. They were vetala, whatever that was. Normal rules didn’t apply.

  “What do you want with us?” the one in front said. She had trouble speaking—her jaw hung by a few threads of tendon. Of all the zombies, she was the most decayed.

  Nick hesitated. They continued to watch him warily.

  “You killed the one who summoned us,” the leader said. “We belong to you. What do you want from us?”

  “Nothing.”

  A rumble went through the pack, and they shifted from foot to foot.

  The leader tilted her head. “We are free to go?”

  “Yes,” Reese said, walking up behind them. “You’re free to go.”

  She continued to study Nick.

  “Go,” he said.

  The leader dipped her head. “Thank you.”

  Her body collapsed. The others did, too, one after another, corpses falling onto the grass and rotting.

  Once Nick had moved the bodies inside, checked the house and made sure there weren’t any more zombies hobbling around, he called Elena. She’d contact the council and decide what to do about a brothel filled with corpses. Maybe he’d be back to clean it up. Maybe he wouldn’t. Not his call, thankfully.

  They walked back to the car in silence. As they got in, Noah said, “So that should work, right? If I tell my friends I went through with it? They won’t . . . know?”

  It took a moment for Nick to realize what he meant.

  Reese beat him to an answer. “They won’t know. We’ll give you a few tips to make it sound good.”r />
  Noah relaxed in the backseat and Nick realized it was what the poor kid wanted all along. Not to lose his virginity. Just to get his friends off his back. If only he’d figured that out sooner . . .

  “I’m going to call Lexi,” Noah said. “Think I can get her back?”

  “Just don’t mention the brothel,” Reese said. “If she finds out, tell her the truth—that nothing happened. I’ll back you up.”

  “And as for winning her back,” Nick said, “I have some tips for that, too.”

  Reese and Noah looked at each other.

  “Um, maybe not,” Noah said. “I appreciate your help, Nick, but after tonight . . .”

  They both laughed.

  “Excuse me?” Nick said. “This was not my idea.”

  But they were talking again, and neither heard him. He sighed and started to drive.

  Suddenly, changing diapers didn’t seem so bad. Parenting teens? Their messes were a lot bigger and a lot tougher to clean up.

  Put On a Happy Face

  CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  The blood seeping out of the midget car was Benny’s first clue that something had gone awry. The audience kept laughing—either they hadn’t seen it yet or they thought it was part of the show—so Benny didn’t slow down. He waddled on his big shoes, storming with exaggerated frustration toward Clancy the Cop, and slapped the other clown in the face with a rubber chicken.

  It looked like it hurt.

  The audience roared.

  Back up.

  The night before—a Friday—the circus had ended at quarter past nine on the dot. Appleby, the manager, was a stickler for punctuality. The last bow took place between ten and fifteen minutes past the hour every performance, and when the thunderous applause—which, honestly, wasn’t always thunderous and was sometimes barely more than a ripple—had died down, the ticket sellers became ushers, ushering folks out of the tent as quickly as possible. The ushers didn’t hurry people because anyone was in a rush to get their makeup off, but because once the little kids started moving, all the popcorn and cotton candy and soda and hot dogs started to churn in their bellies. Much better to hose the vomit off the ground outside than in the tent.

  The clowns ran out of the tent the way NFL teams come onto the field, arms above their heads, whooping and hollering, before the last of the crowd had departed. Benny had always thought it looked stupid, but Zerbo—the boss clown and the troupe’s whiteface—wanted to leave the straggling audience members with an image of the clowns as a kind of family.

  Out behind the tent, the family fell apart. The tents and trailers that made up the circus camp were a tense United Nations of performers and laborers without any real unity. Like a high school full of jocks and geeks and emo kids, the clowns and workers and animal trainers and acrobats each formed their own caste, every group thinking themselves above the others. Friendships existed outside the boundaries of those castes, but when it came to conflict, they stuck together like unions. The acrobats were effete, the animal trainers grave and sensitive, and the workers gruff and strong.

  But nobody fucked with the clowns.

  “You mess with the clown, you get the horns,” Zerbo was fond of misquoting, right before blasting you in the face with an air horn. His idea of a joke. Most people laughed, but Benny had never found the boss clown all that funny.

  The Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe had been playing sold-out audiences in a field in Brimfield, Massachusetts, for a week. Normally, the grounds were used for the huge antique flea market the town held a couple of times a year, but the circus had been a welcome novelty, as far as Benny could tell. Not that Appleby talked to him about it. Clowns were beneath the manager’s notice, except when it came time for him to talk to Zerbo about renewing contracts. Even then, nobody bothered to ask Benny what he thought.

  In the hierarchy of clowns in the Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe, Benny Martini was on the bottom rung. The runt of the litter. The redheaded stepchild. Shit, that last one was probably offensive in these sensitive modern times. No matter. The point was that Benny was an afterthought to everyone, even the audience.

  He’d often thought about how much happier he would have been if, like Tiny and Oscar—two of the other character clowns in the troupe—he’d been too stupid to know it. But even Tiny and Oscar were above him. If the troupe had been a wolf pack, Benny would have been on his back, baring his throat for everyone who came along. And why?

  It was all about the laughs.

  Laughter and his status in the circus, nearly always the only two things he thought about, were foremost on his mind as he followed Zerbo, Oscar, Tiny, Clancy the Cop, and the rest of them into clown alley. Tiny bumped Oscar, then clapped him on the back—they’d successfully completed the Hotshots gag after having totally bungled it the night before. On a façade so rickety even old-time Hollywood stuntmen would’ve shied away from it, three-hundred-pound Tiny dressed in drag and pretended to be a mother trapped with her infant on the third story of a burning building. The fire effects were minimal—gas jets, a low flame, a lot of orange lighting, the whole thing designed by a guy who’d helped put together the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular at Disney World, before he’d been fired for drinking on the job—but it looked great, as long as Tiny didn’t set his wig on fire.

  Oscar, in character as a clown firefighter, pushed a barrel of water back and forth across the ring, exhorting Tiny to throw him the infant and then jump into the water. The culmination of the whole thing was that Tiny’s aim would be off, forcing Oscar to step into the water barrel in order to catch the baby—only a doll, of course. At the moment he caught it, the trapdoor would give way beneath the ring, dropping Oscar and the baby and the water through and giving the audience the impression that the baby had been heavy enough to drive him into the ground. It was a pain in the ass to set up the gag, but when it went off, the surprise always led to real laughs, especially when Tiny theatrically threw up his hands, mopped his sweating face with his wig, took a deep breath, and blew out the fire around the windows like candles on a birthday cake. The lights would go dark. Cue the applause.

  Thursday night, Tiny had stumbled, throwing off his timing. The doll—to the eyes of the crowd, an infant—had tumbled down to splat in the middle of the ring while Oscar stood watching like a fool, until the trapdoor gave way and shot him down into the space beneath. The audience had to know the baby wasn’t real, but they’d screamed all the same.

  Timing was everything, Benny always said.

  How Tiny and Oscar could screw up the gag so badly and still be above him in the pecking order, he would never understand.

  In clown alley that Friday night, he washed off his makeup without a word to any of the others. Most of the time he shot the breeze with them and tried to ignore the fact that, four years since he’d joined up, they still treated him like a mascot, but not tonight. The cold cream took off most of the makeup and then he splashed a little water on his face and dragged on a pair of stained blue jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt—it had been strangely cool the past few nights, uncommon for July in western Massachusetts.

  As he left the others behind and went out to wander the grounds and clear his head, he ran into the lovely blond contortionist, Lorna Seger. There were tears in her eyes and she gave him a helpless, hopeless glance that made him think maybe she wanted to talk about her breakup with the stunt rider, Domingo.

  “Hey,” he said, shaken from the reverie of his self-pity by her sadness. “You okay?”

  Lorna smiled and wiped at her eyes. “Could be worse, I guess,” she said. “I could be a clown.”

  Benny flinched. Lorna chuckled softly to let him know it had been a joke. He hoped Domingo ran her down on his motorcycle.

  “You’re such a bitch,” he said.

  Lorna rolled her eyes. “Why is it clowns never have a sense of humor?”

  He walked on, fuming, wanting to scream, wanting to get the hell away from the circus but crippled by the knowledge that�
�like everyone else who performed under the tent—he had nowhere else to go.

  Put on a happy face, his mother would have said. Remembering did make him smile, but it faded quickly.

  The wind picked up as he walked the grounds, which were rutted and pitted with tire tracks from decades of vehicles moving through the fields in all weather, turning up muddy ridges, which had then dried and hardened. Loud voices came from the trailers where the workers had made their own small camp, and he could smell sausages cooking on a grill. When he passed a tent, he saw them, standing in a semicircle, drinking beer, a small radio picking up a static-laced broadcast of tonight’s Red Sox–Yankees game. Summer in New England. These guys looked like their entire life was a tailgate party. They worked hard and were content with the cycle of labor and paycheck, beer and cookouts and Red Sox games. In a way, Benny envied them.

  The stencil on the side of the converted school bus read ROSE’S MOBILE BOOK FAIR. In a side window there hung a cardboard sign, NEW, USED, AND ANTIQUARIAN—SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE written in thick black Magic Marker. Benny had seen the bus several times this season, in Vermont and New Hampshire and upstate New York. It might’ve been there when they’d played Bangor back in May, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d never been inside—he’d never been much for books, unless they were about clowns or vaudeville or something useful.

  Tonight, he just wanted a distraction.

  The accordion bus door was open and a sign indicated that the mobile book fair was as well, so he went up the couple of steps, ducking his head though he’d never be tall enough to bang it. Oddly enough, he didn’t notice the woman right away. At first, all he could see were the books, and he wondered how she managed to keep them all from falling off the shelves while she drove the old beast of a school bus around the northeastern United States. The metal shelving units had been secured to the walls and lined both sides of the bus. Each shelf had an ingenious device, a bar that went across the spines of the books to hold them in place and could be locked into different notches to accommodate racks of books of different sizes.