Aftertaste

by Kevin J. Anderson

But he looked back.

  And there she was, Catherine Cantrell. She was standing in the window, and she had been moved to look as if she was waving.

  “She just wanted her house back and the truth out,” Alexi said softly.

  She wasn’t real, Andrew told himself.

  But as he did so, the mannequin winked at him. He closed his eyes; he looked again.

  Yes, she winked. Damn her, she winked.

  He lifted a hand and waved.

  Alexi was actually smiling. “She has good taste; she likes you,” Alexi said softly.

  Andrew turned his eyes to the road and floored the gas pedal.

  Short Term

  DANIEL PYLE

  Henderson checked for dogs before hopping the privacy fence: no little wooden house, no sleeping mound of fur chained to a stake, no evidence of feces in the grass. Probably no dog. Probably safe.

  He straddled the slats for a second before dropping into the yard and winced when he landed and his legs buckled beneath him.

  Easy, Gramps. You’re not exactly in your fence-hopping prime.

  Which was true, but not the whole truth. He might not have been as spry as he used to be, but he had plenty of hopping left in him. Plenty of invading. And plenty of what came after.

  He grinned.

  If there were motion-activated lights, Henderson didn’t see them. He took a few steps into the yard. When nothing happened, he crept the rest of the way to the back door and crouched by the knob.

  His knees cracked. He ignored them. His back groaned. He told it to shut the fuck up.

  Before he took his tools from his back pocket, he tried the knob. You wouldn’t believe how often breaking into a place was only a matter of opening the door and letting yourself in. For the most part, midwesterners were honest, down-to-earth, trusting people.

  In other words: idiots.

  The knob turned just a little and caught. Locked.

  Henderson reached for his kit.

  The lock was old looking, cheap. He pulled a torsion wrench and a rake pick from his pouch but didn’t touch the hook pick. No need to get too fancy for a piece of junk like this. He could have picked it with his fingernails.

  Half a minute later, give or take—not a record, but not too terrible when you considered how shaky his hands had gotten in the last few years—the lock disengaged and the knob spun.

  Piece of cake. He jammed the tool kit back into his pocket.

  Somewhere nearby, sirens wailed.

  He let go of the knob and hunkered against the house. No one in the street would have had much chance of seeing him back here, behind the house and the privacy fence and buried in the shadows, but he hadn’t gotten this far in life by taking unnecessary chances. No, sir.

  While he waited for the sirens to fade into the distance—fifteen seconds, thirty, maybe a full minute—he stared into the dark yard and listened to himself breathe. The silence that came when the emergency vehicles finally drove out of earshot surprised him almost as much as the initial burst of noise had, and he rubbed at his temples.

  He waited another minute and then fought his creaking joints to a standing position.

  Okay, where was I?

  The lock was old looking, cheap. Before he reached for his tool kit, he tried the knob (it never hurt to go for the obvious option first). It twisted in his hand, and the door swung open.

  Idiots.

  He pushed the door open just far enough to let himself through and crept inside.

  A small emergency light plugged into an outlet on the far wall provided him with enough illumination to see where he was going. The room seemed to be some sort of makeshift office. A futuristic-looking computer (to be honest, most computers looked like something out of a science fiction movie to Henderson) sat on a table-turned-desk, pulsing white light from a small dot on its bottom edge. He walked past the workstation and crept farther into the house.

  The kitchen smelled like meat. Pot roast for dinner? Maybe. Or steaks. It was hard to tell from an hours-old odor and didn’t really matter either way. Maybe later he’d cut into some bellies and find out. If the mood struck him.

  It was nearly midnight, but that didn’t necessarily mean the occupants would be asleep. Twenty years ago, you’d have had trouble finding someone still awake at this hour, but these days, with twenty-four-hour Walmarts and internet shopping and television stations that never stopped airing their worthless crap, folks didn’t have as much reason to hit the hay after the sun went down. These days, you could break into a place and find a whole family (children included) curled up on the couch and watching a movie at one o’clock in the morning. Henderson had done it.

  But this didn’t look like it was going to be one of those cases. At least not so far. This place was as quiet as they came.

  The deeper into the house he got, the darker it became. He had a small Maglite in one of his back pockets and pulled it out when he could no longer see without it.

  He found a long hallway and checked the rooms on either side. The first was a small half bath with floral wallpaper and a fuzzy cover on the toilet seat. It smelled like citrus and alcohol, like a Screwdriver, although Henderson guessed the scent was probably some sort of lingering soap or disinfectant. The next room looked like it might have been guest quarters once upon a time, but boxes and storage tubs and piles of bric-a-brac made it all but inaccessible and worthless as a sleeping area now. The rest of the house seemed clean enough, so Henderson guessed this was storage overflow rather than some sort of obsessive pack-ratting.

  Down the hall, someone opened a door. Henderson slipped into the guest room and shut the door behind himself, twisting off the flashlight and shoving it back into his pocket as he went. His leg bumped a cardboard box, and for a second he was sure he would knock it over and reveal himself, but the box only wobbled a little and settled back into place.

  Not that it mattered much. He was going to have to run into one of the occupants sooner or later. He wanted to. That had been the plan, right?

  Plan? More like urge.

  Whatever. The point was that he wanted to meet them on his own terms. Sneak up on them. Breathe on the backs of their necks and see the terror in their eyes when they whipped around and found him there grinning and licking his lips.

  The door opener padded down the hallway. Slowly. Henderson pictured a pajama-clad hottie, shuffling along in her socks, her hair tangled and hanging over her face, her love lumps pushing at the front of her too-tight top.

  That image got him stirring in his nether regions and just about convinced him to go ahead and burst out into the hall, but he held himself back, thought about the unsexiest thing he could think of (a geezer named McNeil wandering through the halls at the home wearing nothing but a Depends and sporting streaks of fecal matter on the backs of his legs and inner thighs) and waited for the sounds of footsteps to fade and disappear.

  When it was quiet again, he waited thirty more seconds. Just to be sure. The joints in the fingers on his left hand were killing him. He rubbed at the knuckles and winced. He made a fist, unclenched, made another fist.

  Forget about it. You have more important things to worry about right now.

  Right. Of course. He shook his head and looked around the room. It was hard to see anything in the dark, but he thought he’d brought a flashlight with him. He searched his pants and found the light in his back pocket where a guy would normally keep his wallet.

  He twisted the front of the flashlight and directed the beam around a room full of boxes and storage tubs. Just a bunch of junk from the looks of it. Christmas decorations and unfiled paperwork, old books and vacation souvenirs.

  He crept out of the room and tried the next. This one was a small bathroom. Just a half bath really. A toilet and a small pedestal sink and an orangey smell that made Henderson think of a drink he might have ordered a girl in a bar decades before.

  Without closing the bathroom door, he turned to the room across the hall. Except . . . hadn’t he
already checked that one? He shook his head, rubbed at the skin above his eyebrows and felt the wrinkles there. Yes, he had. Storage boxes. Junk. That’s right. He moved on.

  In a large room at the end of the hall, he found a man sleeping in a bed the size of a small apartment. The guy was flipped over on his belly, wearing a pair of wrinkled pajama bottoms and tangled in a twisted rope of bedsheets. He looked young (Who doesn’t anymore?), maybe in his mid-twenties. He had a lean, runner’s musculature to him. His torso rose and fell gently as he slept, and the sound coming out of his mouth was like something halfway between breathing and snoring.

  Henderson didn’t have much use for a man. Not alive anyway. He snuck across the room, took the alarm clock from the nightstand, and swung it against the side of the man’s head. The clock bounced off his skull, and the kid started to open his eyes. Henderson hit him again before he could wake up and make a scene. And hit him again. And again. He swung until both the clock and the sleeper had stopped ticking. He felt cast-off blood dripping down his face and over his lips. After he wiped away the bulk of it, he bared his teeth and growled.

  The body lay sprawled across the bed (damned mattress must have been an acre across at least). The blood oozing out of the head wound spilled across the pillow and the few pieces of plastic that had broken off the clock’s casing. Henderson left it that way. He’d come back later and have some fun with the corpse, but for now he needed to check the house for others.

  Didn’t you already hear someone else?

  No, he didn’t think so.

  In the hall? Wasn’t there—

  No. He shook his head. That was just his mind trying to play tricks on him again. He needed to concentrate.

  He left the bedroom and snuck down the hall. He peeked into each of the rooms he passed but found no one.

  Something clattered in the kitchen. Henderson grinned and tiptoed that way.

  A single bulb above the sink glowed and lit the room. The woman standing beneath it had a piece of pie on a plate in one hand and a large, half-empty glass of milk on the counter in front of her. She wore a pair of silky pajama bottoms and a thin tank top that probably would have left almost nothing to the imagination if she’d turned around. She had a nice, tight little body.

  She put her plate down beside the glass and spun a roll of paper towels on the wall. A small puddle of milk oozed across the floor from where she stood to a spot near the middle of the room that must have had a little bit of a dip to it. Before she could get the towel off the roll and turn to her mess, Henderson moved to her, pinned her against the cabinet, and wrapped an arm around her chest.

  She stiffened, let out a little yip, and then laughed.

  “Jesus. You scared the shit out of me.”

  Henderson leaned in and nibbled her earlobe. “Good.” The word was more of a rasp coming from his old man’s throat.

  Now she screamed for real. She bucked and spun and continued screaming and punched something into Henderson’s belly just above the waistband of his pants. He looked down and saw the handle of her fork jutting from his stomach, bobbing up and down as he gasped. There were little flecks of pie crust on it.

  The woman twisted and bumped her plate. It slid against the glass, which dropped to the floor and shattered. Milk sprayed across his shoes and her bare feet.

  Henderson backed away, gripped the fork, and jerked it out of his belly. He dropped the utensil to the floor and watched it splash into the spilled milk.

  “Bitch.”

  She was moving away—he’d been right about the revealing top; now that she was facing him, he could see every little bit of nippley goodness—circling him but not turning her back to him, running her hands across the countertop behind her, maybe looking for a knife or some other kind of weapon. Before she could find one, Henderson lunged forward and punched her in the face.

  His fist landed just beneath her eye and didn’t do much except knock her off balance. As she rocked back, she slipped in the milk. She grabbed for the counter but lost her footing and tumbled to the floor beside the dropped fork. She tried to catch herself, but her hands slipped in the mess; her face and chest thumped against the linoleum. Milk splattered up around her, and she jerked.

  He waited for her to scramble around, try to get her footing, maybe even kick at him, try to bring him down with her, but she did none of those things. Except for that initial spasm, she hadn’t moved at all since she hit the floor. Henderson waited another moment and then leaned forward.

  The liquid around her head had started to turn pink. Like strawberry milk. He grabbed her by the hair and flipped her over, still ready for an attack, a game of opossum.

  But she wasn’t going to be attacking anything any time soon. A long jag of broken glass jutted from her chest. From her left breast. The one over her heart. The jag wasn’t moving, and neither was she. He didn’t need to check for a pulse to know she was dead.

  Great. Perfect. What a fucking waste. What are the chances of something like that?

  He snarled and kicked at her body. As if this were all her fault somehow.

  Isn’t it? She’s the one who tried to get away.

  Except they all tried to get away. The ones he didn’t kill in their sleep anyway. You could hardly blame her for that.

  He sighed and turned away from the body.

  What now?

  He needed to check the rest of the house. She probably wasn’t alone here. If he left someone to find her before he had a chance to get far enough away, he might have to worry about running from the cops. No sense risking that.

  He left the kitchen and found a long hallway. Half bath on one side, storage room on the other. At the end of the hall, he found a bedroom and a man asleep beneath a tangle of sheets.

  He didn’t have any use for a man. Not alive anyway. But when he moved to take care of the guy, he saw that someone had beat him to it.

  What the hell?

  A broken alarm clock lay in a pool of blood beside the man’s head. Whoever had done the bashing hadn’t been a pussy about it. You could see folds of flesh beneath the cracked skull and matted hair that must have been brains.

  The blood looked fresh, and Henderson frowned. What were the chances of breaking into a fresh crime scene? They had to be astronomical.

  So? What are you going to believe? The laws of probability or your own fucking eyes?

  He backed away from the bed, shaking his head a little, trying to clear out a half-formed wisp of memory attempting to push its way into his thoughts.

  Get outta here. You picked the wrong damn house, old man.

  He hurried down the hall and into the kitchen.

  The second body lay in a puddle of blood on the floor. Stabbed. The pool of liquid looked lighter than it should have, milky almost. Henderson saw a slice of pie on a plate and tried to piece together a story that could explain it all. The scene reminded him of something he’d seen before, maybe something out of a Hitchcock movie? He couldn’t remember for sure.

  Sirens wailed from somewhere not terribly far away. The next block over maybe.

  Seriously, you’ve got to beat it. If you’re going to take the rap for something, it might as well be something you actually did.

  He stared at the dead woman a second longer. Then he hurried out of the room, through another room with an emergency light blazing from an outlet and a computer on a desk that was really a table.

  The sirens were getting closer.

  He slipped through a door and into the back yard. Halfway to the fence on the other side of the property, his leg twisted and his knee popped. He slid to a stop and felt around the area above and below his joint. It didn’t feel sprained—and definitely not broken—but it sure as hell hurt.

  Go. Now!

  He grimaced and hobbled to the fence. It took him two tries to hop the thing, and when he finally got over, he fell in a heap on the other side. His body ached, screamed. He pushed himself into a sitting position against the fence and waited to see i
f the sirens were coming or passing by.

  The wailing seemed to go on forever. But eventually . . . finally . . . it faded.

  He took a deep breath and stood.

  See? Nothing to worry about.

  He stood on his tiptoes and peered over the fence. He knew better than to hop without looking. Sometimes back yards had big, mean backyard dogs.

  But not this one. No little wooden house, no sleeping mound of fur chained to a stake, no evidence of feces in the grass. Probably no dog. Probably safe.

  He pulled himself over the slats and landed with a spryness he thought he’d lost.

  Piece of cake. Maybe you’re not as far past your prime as you thought.

  He smiled and headed for the house.

  Distressed Travelers

  NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

  Airports are my favorite places to collect emotions. You never know what you’ll pick up. Some of the other Viri like sports events and sappy movies for their powers of flooding humans with feelings we can feed from, but I like the range of experiences people have at airports. Travelers come home from a long time away and fall into the arms of their loved ones. Rush! So chocolate and hot you can burn your receptors. People who are leaving homes and families, full of melancholy and apprehension. Yum, tastes like chicken! People afraid of flying, that teeth-clenching heart-tripping fear, so delicious, like the best red wine! People setting out on trips to other countries . . . people heading home for the funerals of loved ones . . . bored people cruising for hookups . . . so much variety and intensity.

  That night at San Francisco International Airport, when flights were being canceled left and right because of weather delays and people were furious, worried, frustrated, and scared, I was filling up to overflow and didn’t know where I’d store the extra energy without budding off a piece of myself and creating a new person.

  I didn’t like doing that. Newbies took care and training. I did it once about eighty-five years ago and didn’t enjoy it. I was glad to bid my bud farewell when he was old enough, skilled enough at mimicking human form and behavior, and strong enough to set out on his own. The hardest part was teaching him not to kill. But he learned.