The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

“Most Mexicans are Catholic, and most Catholic males are circumcised.”

  “Ugh,” said Carrie. “Too much information.”

  From the concealment of a broad, shaded thicket of skunkbush and screwbean mesquite, bulbous indigo eyes watched them, then died.

  The zigzag access road to the McMillan compound was dead on the eastern property edge, about half a mile back from where Carrie Rixson had spotted the thing on the fence. It paralleled several secure horse corrals before it widened into a gated archway featuring a wrought iron double M (itself a zigzag) up top. The building cluster was organized around a broad donut of paved road—big barn, smaller barn, main house, guesthouse, and a generator-driven industrial icehouse side-by-side with a smaller smokehouse. Further north, in the rear, would be a long, narrow greenhouse with solar panels. Thayer McMillan had made part of his pile breeding quarter horses and Appaloosas. In residence were several trainers and wranglers, in addition to a cook, a housekeeper, and an on-call executive personal assistant. Two of the eight McMillan children still lived at home—Lester, the heir apparent to King Daddy’s throne, and his younger sister Desiree, a recent divorcee with two children of her own, both under ten years old. Thayer, the patriarch, was on his fourth wife, a brassy Houston fireball named Celandine, twenty-five years his junior, or about Desiree’s age. Call it fortyish.

  There was also, it was rumored, security staff.

  It was further rumored that McMillan was pouring concrete to the north of the greenhouse for a private helicopter landing pad.

  There were many other rumors about the McMillans, mostly of the sort slathered about by jealous inferiors, but the one about the chopper pad piqued Cash Dunhill’s interest. That close to the border? Cash had always wanted an excuse to investigate further.

  The light green Bronco kicked up a tailwind of grit as it barreled along the access road. Half a mile in, there was a red pickup truck parked on the shoulder.

  One of those show-offy, urban cowboy rigs with a mega-cab, a Hemi V-8 and double rear tires. Nobody inside or close by. The clearcoat was covered in dust.

  Cash checked it out. “The keys are inside,” he said. It was as though someone had pulled over for a piss and just sank into the earth before he or she could zip up.

  “Nobody on the home line,” said Carrie, snapping her cellphone shut.

  “Just voice mail.”

  “No horses, either,” said Cash. He could see the corrals from where they’d stopped. “Not a single one.”

  “It’s midday; maybe they’re cooling off in the barn.” No doubt the barn was air conditioned.

  “Guess we guessed wrong about the security, too,” he said, a bit distantly, the way he did when he was trying to puzzle out evidence. “Nobody on us yet, nobody at the gate.”

  “Maybe they upgraded,” said Carrie. “Cameras and lasers instead of people.”

  “Maybe.” You could score useful points by agreeing with your partner on things that did not matter. They rumbled over the cowcatcher rails at the gate, within sight of the Cliff May architectural masterpiece that was the main house—a classic of the modernist California Ranch style that blended hacienda elements with the Western aesthetic of building “out” instead of “up.” There was a lot of woodgrain and natural stone. The bold, elongated A-frame of the roof line allowed sunlight to heat the huge pool.

  “How many bedrooms, you figure?” said Cash.

  “Five,” said Carrie. “No, six, and probably at least one bathroom for each. Japanese soaking tubs, I bet. I love those.”

  A large blob of brown was piled near the gate to the northernmost corral.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Horsehide.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Cash, stopping the vehicle again. “Horse.”

  Hollow, split and empty, just like the thing they had found on the barbed-wire fence.

  Carrie already had her weapon out. “There’s a dog over there. But a whole dog, not just skin.” She moved closer to verify. There were spent shotgun cartridges strewn around a dead Rottweiler near the front walkway. “We’d better —”

  “Call this in, now!” Partners often completed each other’s sentences.

  Cash was advised that available law enforcement, this far out, was on a triage basis and they would be required to wait at the scene.

  “Cash, look at this.”

  Carrie indicated a smear of blackish fragments in the dirt, like ash or charcoal. “I stepped on it. But look, here’s another one.”

  It was a dried-up bug. There were several of them in the yard. “Looks like a cicada,” said Cash. “Or one of them cockroaches; you know they get three inches long around here.”

  “But it isn’t. Look.”

  She stabbed it with a Bic pen and held it aloft for inspection. It sounded crispy, desiccated. What resembled an opaque, thornlike stinger protruded from one end, its razor-sharp edge contoured to flare and avoid contact with the body.

  “This isn’t right,” she said. “It can’t be. This is mutated or something. Or a hybrid. No bilateral symmetry.”

  “I don’t understand a thing you just said.”

  “Bilateral,” Carrie said. “Identical on both sides. We’re all base two—two eyes, two arms, two legs. Ants have six legs. Spiders have eight, and eight eyes. One side of the body is a mirror of the other. But not this. Nothing I know of is based on three.”

  Cash, prepared to blow her off, grew more interested. “Maybe it’s missing a leg.”

  “From where?” She turned the thing over in the waning sunlight.

  “There’s no obvious wound.”

  “Maybe that stinger thing is really a leg? Or a tail?”

  “Yeah, and maybe it’s a dick,” she said, disliking patronization.

  “Leave it for the plastic bag boys,” said Cash. “Just don’t touch the sharp thing, okay?”

  “No way.”

  “You suppose maybe a swarm of these locusty things flew in and ate everybody from the inside out?”

  “Then why aren’t there dead ones inside the . . . ” Carrie sputtered out, groping for the right word. “Carcasses? That much fine dining, there should be a couple thousand of them around.”

  Cash knocked loudly and rang the bell while Carrie thumbed the latch on a door handle that probably cost three weeks of her pay. “It’s open,” she said.

  “Probable cause?”

  “You’ve gotta be shitting me, Cash.”

  Then Cash would say . . .

  “I wouldn’t shit you, darlin, you’re my favorite turd.”

  But he, too, had his weapon limbered up, a Ruger GP100 double-action revolver in .357 Mag. Carrie packed a full-sized Smith & Wesson M&P-40 that held sixteen rounds with one in the pipe—cartridges that Cash knew to be semiwadcutters.

  Feeling increasingly absurd, they both called into the acoustically vacant recesses of the house. The coolers were on full-blast.

  “Jesus,” she said. “It must be below fifty degrees in here.”

  “Like the frozen food aisle at the supermarket.” They covered each other excellently. Goosebumps speckled their sun-licked flesh.

  Cash shook his head. Think of the utility bill.

  “Well, room by room, I guess,” he said, uncertainly.

  The showplace central room was large and vaulted, with a grape-stake ceiling and a fireplace large enough to roast a Smart Car. Very open. All other rooms were peripheral.

  The deeper they ventured, the more tenantless the house seemed. Neither one of them called out any more—that was just instinctive, the old telepathy of partners sharing a silent warning.

  Carrie checked the behemoth Sub-Zero Pro fridge for sealed bottled water, just for hydration’s sake. Do it when you can. Several more of the bugs, chilled and lifeless, were on the top shelf near an open half gallon of milk.

  Keeping her voice low, Carrie said, “I’m thinking disease, Cash; what are you thinking?”

  Cash nodded. “Something insect-borne, somet
hing special. That means government spooks and security. But not here; the goddamned door was open.”

  He gratefully plugged water down his throat. It was so cold it gave him a migraine spike.

  “Either that or a really pissed-off butcher with some kind of vendetta. But I don’t see any blood anywhere. How about we just back off?”

  “Crime scene,” said Cash. “We’ve got to stay.”

  “What’s the crime?”

  “We really oughta leave this for larger minds,” he said, full up with doubt.

  “Don’t you chicken out on me, Cash Dunhill. It’s not seemly.”

  “Something is going on; we’re just not smart enough to figure it ou —”

  She held up her free hand to cut him off. “Hold.”

  A noise; they both heard it. A soft noise. A soft, shuffling, sliding noise.

  Something was moving toward them in the hallway.

  “Mommy,” said the thing.

  It appeared at a fast glance to be a little girl in blue jeans and a bright yellow Taylor Swift T-shirt (logoed You Are the Best Thing That’s Ever Been Mine), lurching along as though drugged, in a pair of blocky K-Swiss Tubes. Her bronze-colored hair was lank and damp.

  “Holy shit,” whispered Carrie.

  The voice was all wrong. That “Mommy” had come out as a froggy, guttural croak. The front of the T-shirt was soaked, as though she had vomited. She looked past the two officers, not at them. Half her face seemed to be melting off. The whole left side was slack and drooping, elongating her eye and hanging her jaw crookedly down.

  “Mommy make samwich peen butter gahh.”

  Thick yellow mucus was cascading out of her nose.

  Carrie moved to kneel, arms out. “Honey . . . ?”

  “Don’t touch her, for godsake!”

  “Found it,” the girl said, voice hitching with phlegm.

  “Found what, sweetie?” Carrie was keeping her distance.

  “Pretty,” said the girl. She opened her hand. One of the bugs was there.

  Crouching at the abrupt light, tripod legs tensing. It was alive.

  “Oh my god,” Carrie said as the bug sprang across the three feet between them like a grasshopper, hit her in the face, and sank its wicked-looking barb into her cheek. In the light, Cash swore he could see fluid drain from the translucent stinger.

  Cash shouted and charged, kicking sidelong to lay out the kid, swatting with his hand to dispose of the attacking bug. It hit the floor with its legs up, dead already, like the ones they’d found in the yard.

  “Stupid, stupid!” Carrie had landed on her ass.

  “Lemme see that. Quick, now.”

  “Squeeze it. Cut it if you have to!” Her cheek was swelling and darkening already. Her right eye was going crimson.

  Cash put his thumbs together to try to evacuate the poison—if that’s what it was—from the entry wound, but no dice. A tiny dot of bluish wetness welled up at the puncture, but nothing was coming out. He almost tried to suck it, using snakebite protocol.

  “Don’t put your mouth on it, Cash, for fuck’s sake!” Carrie was sweeping her arms around, preparatory to trying to stand again, but her movements went thick and wide.

  “Astringent,” Cash said. “Disinfectant.” There had to be something in the kitchen or a nearby bathroom. In a glass-doored liquor cabinet he found some 120-proof Stolichnaya vodka. Stashed behind it was a crumpled soft pack of Camel Lights with two bent cigarettes inside, which he stashed in his uniform blouse’s flap pocket. Two wouldn’t kill him.

  He dashed vodka over Carrie’s wound. “I can’t even feel it,” she said. “It should burn.”

  The kid was standing back up.

  “Bike,” she said. Her eyes were looking two different directions. The skin on one arm seemed skewed, as though her hand was mounted backward on the bone. With the other hand, the girl pawed at her face and caught hold of her slack, hanging lower lip. She pulled it downward and it began to peel away. The buttery flesh on her neck split and began to slough. Her yellow shirt absorbed more discharge, from within.

  For that single second, Cash and Carrie were transfixed in mute witness.

  The little girl’s face flopped around her neck like a rubber cowl. In its place was a knob of pale meat resembling a clenched fist, with two bulging button eyes, shiny, featureless orbs that were not black, but a very deep indigo.

  Together, Cash and Carrie opened fire.

  Their slugs hoisted and dumped the thing, which had begun to walk toward them again. It fell back into the corridor in a broken jackstraw sprawl.

  “It was starting to tear off the skin,” Carrie said, distantly. Its raised arm lingered, clenching a handful of wadded-up neck. Then it toppled over and hit the marble floor tiles with a juicy slaughterhouse smack.

  Whatever was leaking out of the bullet holes looked like plain water. Faintly bluish.

  “Come on,” urged Cash. “To hell with this. We’ve got to get you out of here, pronto.”

  “Good idea,” said Carrie. Her voice was going furry and opiate, as from a severe allergic reaction. Congestion, histamine levels redlining.

  He lifted her bodily, not thinking of all the times he’d wanted to brush her boobs, her butt, just playfully.

  Then Cash would say . . .

  “Hang on, darlin, you and me are traveling.” Warily he observed the pewter light in the windows. Twilight had already fallen. Sundown came fast in the desert.

  Just get to the vehicle, he thought. Just burn ass outta here.

  But the Bronco, sitting in the front turnaround, had already been dumped on its side, partially spiderwebbing the windshield.

  And two more things of full-grown human size were waiting for them, with their bulging, dark, ratlike eyes.

  They had shucked their human envelopes and stood on either side of the upended Bronco. Like UFO “grays,” but lumpier and mottled. Two arms with pincer hands. Two legs. Bilateral symmetry. No facial features except the convex eyes, deep blue, no pupils or irises. They looked spindly. But they had turned the Bronco over.

  Cash had to place Carrie on the ground in order to execute a speed reload. If he shot them center mass, they only flinched. Headshots put them down more definitively.

  “Shotgun,” said Carrie from the ground. “Truck. Keys. Run.”

  Then Cash would say . . .

  “I’m not leaving you!”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. She managed to prop herself on one elbow to dump the Smith’s clip and refresh. “Get the shotgun. Run as fast as you can to the truck and bring it back. I’m not going anywhagh . . . ”

  She coughed viscously.

  “You sure?” Weapon up, Cash was scanning the perimeter nervously. Go. Stay. Go. Stay.

  “Go,” Carrie said. “I’m a big girl.”

  Cash wasted several more seconds trying to upright the Bronco by himself. No go. The adrenalin surge of legendary vehicular rescues had failed him. He retrieved the Mossberg pump from the cabin mount (he never locked it unless he was handing over the vehicle; in his worldview, speedy readiness outranked rules). The veins in his head were livid and throbbing. Thirty yards distant was the structure that shaded the big freezer unit and the smokehouse.

  The freezer. The cold house. Sunset. These monsters did not like the light or the heat. They coffined up in the daytime. Now it was nighttime.

  The bugs stung you, injected you. These things grew inside you, then peeled you off like a chrysalis. When they did, there wasn’t any you left. You had become nutrient and a medium for gestation.

  Their purpose or motive could be hashed out later by others, people with degrees and ordnance and expensive backup. Right now, Carrie was stung and waning. Who knew what her timetable was, or whether the effect could be neutralized? In the movies, monsters who upset the status quo were always defeated by something ordinary and obvious, usually discovered by accident—seawater, dog whistles, paprika, Slim Whitman music. In movies, the salvational curative was always
set up in the first act as a throwaway, sure to encore later with deeper meaning.

  In movies, you found a cure, gave the victim a pill or an injection, and they were instantly okay. A miracle, wrap it up, the end, roll credits.

  Cash ran faster, his boot heels thudding on the roadway, the sound reminding him of a shopping cart with a bum wheel, the kind he always seemed to draw at the market. How did the wheels get those bumps, anyway?

  With proper warmup and training, track sprinters could do eight hundred meters in three minutes. That was without a gunbelt and equipment, without cowboy boots or Cash’s lamentable diet. Without panic or terror. What a laugh, if he ran himself right into a heart attack.

  Then they’d find his body and use him as an incubator.

  Then Carrie would say . . .

  Man up. Don’t be afraid. Solve the problem. Work fast and sure.

  But he was afraid. Normally fear got shoved behind revulsion or duty. Fear was tamped down and tucked away. Cash did not want to go back. He wanted to show this place his ass and taillights, never to return.

  Carrie would have come for him, so he forced himself to stay on track. To do the manly thing, the brave-and-true thing. He did not wish to look bad in her eyes.

  Gunshots echoed behind him. Five, six, seven rounds.

  “Dammit to hell!” He spit the toothpick from his already arid mouth.

  The red Ram pickup was twenty yards away, chrome bumpers glinting.

  Cash roared the truck through the archway, cutting hard left to skid clear of where he had left Carrie. The dual rear wheels churned a broad curtain of dust.

  Carrie was not to be seen in the yard or near the porch. Two more of the bipedal things were spread-eagled in the dirt, missing most of their heads, forming big, wet puddles around themselves. Carrie’s .40 was there on the ground, too. The action was not locked back; it still had rounds in it.

  Cash was sure that if he wanted trouble, he’d find it in the big freezer. The creatures he had seen were pallid, like cadavers; featurelessly smooth, like a reptile’s clammy underbelly; undoubtedly alien or aberrant, which suggested a moist toxicity as incomprehensible as a biowar germ. The smart thing to do was leave.

  The right thing to do was rescue Carrie, if she could still be saved.