The Best of the Best Horror of the Year

by Ellen Datlow

  So Ormon was right.

  Crain looked across to him, one foot planted on a dead wrist, his chicken elbows cocked back, trying to disinter the ulna from its double-helix soul mate of a radius.

  “You’re right,” Crain said across to him.

  Dr. Ormon raised his face, waited for the punch line.

  “About how they hear,” Crain said, pointing with his chin down 95.

  Left Arm was still two or three car lengths from Dr. Ormon.

  Dr. Ormon flinched back, tangled in the legs of the woman whose marrow he was plundering.

  “I got it,” Crain said, and stepped forward, past Dr. Ormon, and, when he was close enough, timing it after a clumsy left-arm swipe, he planted the sole of his boot in Left Arm’s chest, sent him tumbling, then stepped in neatly to finish it with the tibia as hammer, as axe, as—as tool.

  It made his arm feel floppy and chimp-like, as if unaccustomed, as if only using this long bone from sudden, forgettable inspiration.

  “Not very persistent after all, are they?” Dr. Ormon said from his corpse.

  Crain looked back to Dr. Ormon about this, and then down to Left Arm.

  Right beside him was one of the plundered, the dead, the feasted on. The dead-dead.

  Crain lowered himself to this clean corpse, to salvage what he could—pockets first, then the bones, for marrow—and found himself holding Left Arm’s left arm. Just to move it away, off.

  But then he pulled on it instead.

  Because zombies are already decomposing, it came off at the shoulder.

  Crain studied it, studied it—not very persistent, are they?—and finally nodded to himself, reached through the rancid meat for the bone, liberated it.

  The brittle end snapped off under his thumb like a Pez dispenser.

  There was still marrow inside.

  Crain considered it, considered it (not very persistent, are they?), finally nodded to himself.

  “You still into ulnas?” he called across to Dr. Ormon.

  “Give them a chance,” Dr. Ormon said back, not bothering to turn around.

  “Here,” Crain said, walking Left Arm’s ulna across, careful not to tip the syrupy marrow out. “I broke it already, sorry.”

  “I really shouldn’t,” Dr. Ormon said, smiling, taking the ulna between his fingers. “Male or female?” he asked.

  He was keeping track. Like it mattered.

  “Male,” Crain said, loving the truth of it, and watched Dr. Ormon tip the broken end of the bone into his mouth.

  Dr. Ormon had already swallowed by the time the taste registered.

  He fell to his knees coughing, trying to puke.

  Crain pinched his pants up at the thighs to squat down, say it right to Dr. Ormon: “We’re not bone suckers, Doctor. We’re persistence hunters. I think you’ll come to agree with me here shortly.”

  Dr. Ormon tried to respond but could only sputter and gag, swing his arm back and forth for Crain’s pants leg.

  He was already changing, then.

  “This can be chapter six,” Crain said. “That sound good to you, sir?”

  Dr. Ormon’s head bobbed with his regurgitation efforts. With his transformation. With his inevitable acquiescence. Not just to the virus, but to the strength of Crain’s argument.

  Chapter six, then. It was going to be perfect.

  Crain stood, turned to survey his options.

  Eighty miles behind him was the campus, with all its vending machines, all its dorm-room toilets to drink from.

  All its concrete and asphalt, stretched tight like an eardrum.

  The woods, then. Back to the trees.

  The soft earth there wouldn’t transmit his location to the herd. To any stragglers.

  In this particular re-enactment, Crain was to be prey, he knew.

  Behind him, the all-too-human horde, exhausting the landscape.

  This was his thesis in action. His final proof.

  He smiled to himself, if smiles still mattered, and was flipping a coin in his head—trees to the east, or trees to the west?—when the blue backpack pulled his attention over.

  The lump was gently kicking. A small fist, pushing against the fabric. The baby, more resilient than Dr. Ormon had thought. More human.

  Crain turned to Dr. Ormon, already trying to figure out how to stand again, into this new world.

  Maybe fifteen seconds, then. Ten to be safe.

  Crain ran to the backpack, grabbed the infant up.

  A girl.

  “Oh, Eve,” he said, and pulled her to his chest, one of her arms more floppy than it should have been, the ribs on that side dangerously concave. But the other lung was working fine. She mewled, was building to a scream.

  Crain chose the side of the road where the trees were closest.

  Crossing the ditch, the infant held tight in both arms, because he didn’t have close to enough body hair for her to clutch on to with her tiny right hand, Crain shook his head to clear the sweat from his eyes.

  The gazelles did learn to perspire, he said in his head to Dr. Ormon, shuffling into place behind him, and the race, it was on, it had never really ended, not since those first delicate steps, six million years ago.

  IN A CAVERN, IN A CANYON

  LAIRD BARRON

  Husband number one fondly referred to me as the Good Samaritan. Anything from a kid lost in the neighborhood to a countywide search-and-rescue effort, I got involved. If we drove past a fender-bender, I had to stop and lend a hand or snap a few pictures, maybe do a walk-around of the scene. A major crash? Forget about it—I’d haunt the site until the cows came home or the cops shooed me away. Took the better part of a decade for the light bulb to flash over my hubby’s bald head. He realized I wasn’t a Samaritan so much as a fetishist. Wore him down in the end and he bailed. I’m still melancholy over that one.

  Lucky for him he didn’t suffer through my stint with the Park Service in Alaska. After college and the first kid, I finagled my way onto the government payroll and volunteered for every missing person, lost climber, downed plane, or wrecked boat scenario. I hiked and camped on the side. Left my compass and maps at home. I wanted to disappear. Longest I managed was four days. The feds were suspicious enough to send me to a shrink who knew his business. The boys upstairs gave me a generous severance check and said to not let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. Basically the beginning of a long downward slide in my life.

  Husband number three divorced me for my fifty-fourth birthday. I pawned everything that wouldn’t fit into a van and drove from Ohio back home to Alaska. I rented a doublewide at the Cottonwood Point Trailer Park near Moose Pass, two miles along the bucolic and winding Seward Highway from Cassie, my youngest daughter.

  A spruce forest crowds the back door. Moose nibble the rhododendron hedging the yard. Most folks tuck in for the night by the time Colbert is delivering his monologue.

  Cassie drops off my infant granddaughter, Vera, two or three times a week or whenever she can’t find a sitter. Single and working two jobs (hardware cashier by day, graveyard security at the Port of Seward Wednesday and Friday), Cassie avoided the inevitability of divorce by not getting married in the first place. She kept the dumb, virile fisherman who knocked her up as baby-daddy and strictly part time squeeze. Wish I’d thought of that. Once I realized that my nanny gig was a regular thing, I ordered a crib and inveigled the handsome (and generally drunken, alas) fellow at 213 to set it up in my bedroom.

  On the nanny evenings, I feed Vera her bottle and watch westerns on cable. “Get you started right,” I say to her as Bronson ventilates Fonda beneath a glaring sun, or when a cowboy rides into the red-and-gold distance as the credits roll. She’ll be a tomboy like her gram if I have any influence. The classic stars were my heroes once upon a time—Stewart, Van Cleef, Wayne, and Marvin. During my youth, I utterly revered Eastwood. I crushed big time on The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry. Kept a poster from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on my bedroom wall. So young, both of us. So
innocent. Except for the shooting and murdering, and my lustful thoughts, but you know.

  Around midnight, I wake from a nap on the couch to Vera’s plaintive cry. She’s in the bedroom crib, awake and pissed for her bottle. The last act of High Plains Drifter plays in scratchy 1970s Technicolor. It’s the part where the Stranger finally gets around to exacting righteous vengeance. Doesn’t matter that I’ve missed two rapes, a horsewhipping, Lago painted red and renamed HELL … all those images are imprinted upon my hindbrain. I get the impression the scenes are always rolling down there against the screen of my subconscious.

  I am depressed to recognize a cold fact in this instant. The love affair with bad boy Clint ended years and years ago, even if I haven’t fully accepted the reality. Eyes gummed with sleep, I sit for a few seconds, mesmerized by the stricken faces of the townspeople who are caught between a vicious outlaw gang and a stranger hell-bent on retribution. The Stranger’s whip slithers through the saloon window and garrotes an outlaw. I’ve watched that scene on a dozen occasions. My hands shake and I can’t zap it with the remote fast enough.

  That solves one problem. I take the formula from the fridge and pop it into the fancy warmer Cassie obtained during a clearance sale. The LED numerals are counting down to nothing when it occurs to me that I don’t watch the baby on Sundays.

  The night in 1977 that my father disappeared, he, Uncle Ned, and I drove north along Midnight Road, searching for Tony Orlando. Dad crept the Fleetwood at a walking pace. My younger siblings, Doug, Shauna, and Artemis, remained at home. Doug was ostensibly keeping an eye on our invalid grandmother, but I figured he was probably glued to the television with the others. That autumn sticks in my memory like mud to a Wellington. We were sixteen, fourteen, eleven, and ten. Babes in the wilderness.

  Uncle Ned and I took turns yelling out the window. Whenever Orlando pulled this stunt, Dad swore it would be the last expedition he mounted to retrieve the “damned mutt.” I guess he really meant it.

  Middle-school classmate Nancy Albrecht once asked me what the hell kind of name was that for a dog, and I said Mom and Dad screwed on the second date to “Halfway to Paradise,” and if you laugh I’ll smack your teeth down your throat. I have a few scars on my knuckles, for damn sure.

  Way back then, we lived in Eagle Talon, Alaska, an isolated port about seventy miles southwest of Anchorage. Cruise ships bloated the town with tourists during spring, and it dried up to around three hundred resident souls come autumn.

  Eastern settlers had carved a hamlet from wilderness during the 1920s; plunked it down in a forgotten vale populated by eagles, bears, drunk Teamsters and drunker fishermen. Mountains and dense forest on three sides formed a deep-water harbor. The channel curved around the flank of Eagle Mountain and eventually let into Prince William Sound. Roads were gravel or dirt. We had the cruise ships and barges. We also had the railroad. You couldn’t make a move without stepping in seagull shit. Most of us townies lived in a fourteen-story apartment complex called the Frazier Estate. We kids shortened it to Fate. Terra incognita began where the sodium lamplight grew fuzzy. At night, wolves howled in the nearby hills. Definitely not the dream hometown of a sixteen-year-old girl. As a grown woman, I recall it with a bittersweet fondness.

  Upon commencing the hunt for Orlando, whom my little brother Doug had stupidly set free from the leash only to watch in mortification as the dog trotted into the sunset, tail furled with rebellious intent, Dad faced a choice—head west along the road, or troll the beach where the family pet sometimes mined for rotten salmon carcasses. We picked the road because it wound into the woods and our shepherd-husky mix hankered after the red squirrels that swarmed during the fall. Dad didn’t want to walk if he could avoid it. “Marched goddamned plenty in the Corps,” he said. It had required a major effort for him to descend to the parking garage and get the wagon started and pointed in the general direction of our search route. Two bad knees, pain pills for said knees, and a half-pack-a-day habit had all but done him in.

  Too bad for Uncle Ned and me, Midnight Road petered out in the foothills. Moose trails went every which way from the little clearing where we’d parked next to an abandoned Winnebago with a raggedy tarp covering the front end and black garbage bags over the windows. Hobos and druggies occasionally used the Winnebago as a fort until Sheriff Lockhart came along to roust them. “Goddamned railroad,” Dad would say, despite the fact that if not for the railroad (for which he performed part-time labor to supplement his military checks) and the cruise ships and barges, there wouldn’t be any call for Eagle Talon whatsoever.

  Uncle Ned lifted himself from the back seat and accompanied me as I shined the flashlight and hollered for Orlando. Dad remained in the station wagon with the engine running and the lights on. He honked the horn every couple of minutes.

  “He’s gonna keep doing that, huh?” Uncle Ned wasn’t exactly addressing me, more like an actor musing to himself on the stage. “Just gonna keep leanin’ on that horn every ten seconds—”

  The horn blared again. Farther off and dim—we’d come a ways already. Birch and alder were broken by stands of furry black spruce that muffled sounds from the outside world. The black, green, and gray webbing is basically the Spanish moss of the Arctic. Uncle Ned chuckled and shook his head. Two years Dad’s junior and a major league stoner, he’d managed to keep it together when it counted. He taught me how to tie a knot, paddle a canoe, and gave me a lifetime supply of dirty jokes. He’d also explained that contrary to Dad’s Cro-Magnon take on teenage dating, boys were okay to fool around with so long as I ducked the bad ones and avoided getting knocked up. Which ones were bad? I wondered. Most of them, according to the Book of Ned, but keep it to fooling around and all would be well. He also clued me in to the fact that Dad’s vow to blast any would-be suitor’s pecker off with his twelve-gauge was an idle threat. My old man couldn’t shoot worth spit even when sober.

  The trail forked. One path climbed into the hills where the undergrowth thinned. The other path curved deeper into the creepy spruce where somebody had strung blue reflective tape among the branches—a haphazard mess like the time Dad got lit up and tried to decorate the Christmas tree.

  “Let’s not go in there,” Uncle Ned said. Ominous, although not entirely unusual as he often said that kind of thing with a similar, laconic dryness. That bar looks rough, let’s try the next one over. That woman looks like my ex-wife, I’m not gonna dance with her, uh-uh. That box has got to be heavy. Let’s get a beer and think on it.

  “Maybe he’s at the beach rolling in crap,” I said. Orlando loved bear turds and rotten salmon guts with a true passion. There’d be plenty of both near the big water, and as I squinted into the forbidding shadows, I increasingly wished we’d driven there instead.

  Uncle Ned pulled his coat tighter and lit a cigarette. The air had dampened. I yelled “Orlando!” a few more times. Then we stood there for a while in the silence. It was like listening through the lid of a coffin. Dad had stopped leaning on the horn. The woodland critters weren’t making their usual fuss. Clouds drifted in and the darkness was so complete it wrapped us in a cocoon. “Think Orlando’s at the beach?” I said.

  “Well, I dunno. He ain’t here.”

  “Orlando, you stupid jerk!” I shouted to the night in general.

  “Let’s boogie,” Uncle Ned said. The cherry of his cigarette floated in mid-air and gave his narrowed eyes a feral glint. Like Dad, he was middling tall and rangy. Sharp-featured and often wry. He turned and moved the way we’d come, head lowered, trailing a streamer of Pall Mall smoke. Typical of my uncle. Once he made a decision, he acted.

  “Damn it, Orlando.” I gave up and followed, sick to my gut with worry. Fool dog would be the death of me, or so I suspected. He’d tangled with a porcupine the summer before and I’d spent hours picking quills from his swollen snout because Dad refused to take him in to see Doc Green. There were worse things than porcupines in these woods—black bears, angry moose, wolves—and I feared my precious
idiot would run into one of them.

  Halfway back to the car, I glimpsed a patch of white to my left amidst the heavy brush. I took it for a birch stump with holes rotted into the heartwood. No, it was a man lying on his side, matted black hair framing his pale face. By pale, I mean bone-white and bloodless. The face you see on the corpse of an outlaw in those old-timey Wild West photographs.

  “Help me,” he whispered.

  I trained my light on the injured man; he had to be hurt because of the limp, contorted angle of his body, his shocking paleness. He seemed familiar. The lamp beam broke around his body like a stream splits around a large stone. The shadows turned slowly, fracturing and changing him. He might’ve been weirdo Floyd who swept the Caribou after last call, or that degenerate trapper, Bob-something, who lived in a shack in the hills with a bunch of stuffed moose heads and mangy beaver hides. Or it might’ve been as I first thought—a tree stump lent a man’s shape by my lying eyes. The more I stared, the less certain I became that it was a person at all.

  Except I’d heard him speak, raspy and high-pitched from pain; almost a falsetto.

  Twenty-five feet, give or take, between me and the stranger. I didn’t see his arm move. Move it did, however. The shadows shifted again and his hand grasped futilely, thin and gnarled as a tree branch. His misery radiated into me, caused my eyes to well with tears of empathy. I felt terrible, just terrible, I wanted to mother him, and took a step toward him.

  “Hortense. Come here.” Uncle Ned said my name the way Dad described talking to his wounded buddies in ’Nam. The ones who’d gotten hit by a grenade or a stray bullet. Quiet, calm, and reassuring was the ticket—and I bet his tone would’ve worked its magic if my insides had happened to be splashed on the ground and the angels were singing me home. In this case, Uncle Ned’s unnatural calmness scared me, woke me from a dream where I heroically tended a hapless stranger, got a parade and a key to the village, my father’s grudging approval.