“A lunar eclipse. I forgot, yeah. What time is that happening? Three quarter moon. We wouldn’t see anything even if we could go outside in the yard. Too much cloud cover.”
“Can I bum another smoke?”
The guard lighted his last two cigarettes, briefly extending the lighter between the bars, a Dark Ages explorer trying to survey the depths of a strange cave, in vain. The darkness shrank a few inches, but that was all. The metal at the lighter’s crown heated and blackened and the flame doubled and licked his thumbnail. The yellow core transfixed him.
He lived three miles down the road in a doublewide in a shabby court. The court was owned by his aunt on his mother’s side and she cut him a deal. He ate microwave dinners, except for Friday nights down at the Rattler Saloon. Those nights he bought a T-bone steak and a pitcher of draft and watched the game on the plasma hanging over the bar and pretended to give a shit. He usually slept on an antique La-Z-Boy by the dying light of a box television. His dog, a Boerboel named Zilla, had passed away the week before Christmas last year, so now he talked to himself while watching Masterpiece Theater presentations of Agatha Christie mysteries, muttered his hypotheses regarding whodunit into empty air. None of the guys knew he watched MPT and Nova, and he was careful not to let on. Crassness and insensitivity were armor and shield at the Station. More importantly, these traits were camouflage. They thought he brutalized the inmates he took a shine to, that he coerced his lovers. Romance, sentimentality; those were traits his colleagues would sneer at. Contempt was dangerous at the Station.
The guard blinked and snapped the lighter shut. He said, “I watched a special about ants on Nova the other night. Well, I saw two things, related though. One on the ants, these mega-colonies that are spreading all over the planet. Trillions upon trillions of them. Foreign tribes don’t make war when they meet. Scientists brought a few over from a colony in Japan and exposed them to a colony that’s taking over California. The ants shook pincers, made love, assimilated. The white-coats didn’t say it in so many words, but the bugs are planning something. Probably a coup d’état.”
“Saw the movie,” the convict said, taking a disaffected drag on his cigarette. “When I was a kid. Goddamn gigantic ants taking over the Earth. In black and white. I hear lotsa bad shit about ants on the news. A lady at an old folks home in Arizona got eaten alive by a bunch a red fire ants. She had dementia and some other stuff and couldn’t move. Ants came tricklin’ through a hole in the wall. Started with her eyes and nose, I guess. True story.”
“Jesus H,” the guard said. He imagined the old lady as a husk wrapped in flannel, and the black train of ants traveling through the wall and across the shiny floor of a night desert. The moon clouded and blackened as the metal of his lighter had clouded and blackened. The music of the stars was a faint shriek. “The other story on Nova was about zombie ants.”
“What the fuck? Zombie ants. That’s some crazy shit.”
“There’s a prehistoric fungus that was recently discovered in the jungle. Very rare. It releases spores that infect ants. Consumes them from the inside and controls their behavior. Tries to send them back to the main colony to spread the joy. When the victims die, tendrils sprout from their corpses and eject more spores. The pictures are gruesome. Sure, it’s just ants, but holy shit.”
The convict chuckled and his voice changed, became softer, androgynous. “Oh, I saw that episode too. Frightfully macabre, how the fungus causes its prey species to fruit. That’s what it’s called, the horror of the ants bursting apart with fungal blooms. Fruiting. Cue the jokes. Or not.” The convict tossed his cigarette butt away in a trail of tiny sparks. He straightened and drew himself to intimidating height with a prolonged crackle of his spine. “It’s called Cordyceps and it doesn’t devour ants exclusively. There are thousands of variations on the progenitor, each adapting to a diet of a specific species. I’m here to tell you that Cordyceps is a relatively new organism, an adolescent scion. The mother genus is much older. Much older and, as of these past months, much more aggressive.”
The guard smiled reflexively and turned his head slightly away before lurching forward and smashing the convict across the jaw with the Maglite. The flashlight made an odd, hollow clink, and its plastic bits flew apart as its metal crumpled and the guard’s arm went dead as if he’d struck a cement pillar. The convict slapped the broken weapon away and pushed him onto the damp floor as one might flatten a toddler. The guard lay in an inverted crucifix position, and he saw the light at the intersection go out. Then he saw nothing but the blackness that encased the world.
The convict said, “There, there, lover. You’re all right. You’re with me. I won’t let the bogeymen get you.”
“You are the bogeyman,” the guard said.
“I’m a pet. We’re all pets, servitors of the gods. I was infected that night in the field. That’s why the powers-that-be transferred me and a few of my fellow initiates here. As you said, to spread the joy to the entire colony. The insane part of this? You aren’t even talking to me. I retrograded nine nights ago. You’ve been copulating with a fruiting corpse these past several trysts. This conversation is stimulated by pheromones that render prey compliant through hallucination. The geography cone squirts something similar at fish. The fish enters quasi-paralysis, swims in place, confused and disoriented. Then the cone slides over and does its dirty business.”
“I’m talking to myself. I’m talking to myself. I’m talking to myself.”
“No, you’re speaking to the gloriously transmogrified hulk of a former human being who will soon add your quiescent flesh and screaming brain to the mother of all mushroom beds. Like any man who has ever spoken to his god, you’re also answering your own questions. Those spores attack the mind, cause it to compartmentalize, to create a multiplicity of simulated consciousnesses.”
The guard traced the wall of memory in search of a crack, a flaw, a blackout, that might signal the demarcation of dream and reality, the place he’d swerved from the road. He found, with a feeble pang, that everything prior to this terrifying moment in the dark, was rapidly crumbling and sliding into an abyss. What he’d eaten for breakfast, listened to on the radio while commuting to work, his home phone number, his mother’s maiden name, gone. All of it siphoned away. He caught a glimpse of himself driving across a landscape crawling with white cotton candy, the dark bulk of the prison enmeshed in it like a tumor eating its way through a lung. He glimpsed bloated half-corpses of men in cells, quietly rupturing, birthing pallid tendrils and tubers. He said, “Please, no. Let me go.”
“Go where? It’s all over but the crying out there. The Rapture you all waited for, hath come at last. Be at ease. I’m going to kiss you.” The convict’s breath was ripe and cool and very close. “Welcome to the garden of our lords.” And his tepid mouth closed over the guard’s. It tasted of sweet, black earth, raw with ferment. The guard struggled, imagining a billion spores shooting down his throat, crocheting a murderous skein through his internal organs. He felt his blood reversing up the esophageal passage, engorging the parasite mounted atop him. Everything brightened, became white incandescence. He screamed into the mouth suctioning his own.
The guard shuddered and opened his eyes and nearly fell as vertigo assailed him. He was still leaning against the wall; the cigarette still smoldered in his hand; the convict watched him, features obscured in shadow. The light at the intersection dimmed and flickered, then was steady. “My god. My god.”
“You okay?” the convict said. He sounded concerned, sounded himself again.
“What were we talking about?”
“How I almost got away, but ended up in this shithole? Gonna be a movie of my life story. Starring you and me.”
“Before that. Before that.”
“There’s nothin’ before that, man. Nothin’ important, anyhow.”
“We’ve been away too long. Better get back to the block, see you to your bunk.” The guard said this without conviction, his thoughts turned inw
ard, a snow flurry accelerating away from his grasping fingers.
“I got an idea,” the convict said. “Nobody’s missin’ us. C’mere. Let’s rest a while, here in the dark.” He opened his arms.
The guard smoked his cigarette to the filter, vaguely troubled. The vertigo dissipated, replaced by contentment, a diluted sensation of euphoria he hadn’t experienced in an age and almost didn’t recognize. He crushed the butt under his shoe. He slouched over to the convict and pressed into the circle of his arm and closed his eyes. His heart began to speed. “Ah, I know what this is,” he said.
“Yeah, what?”
“Love,” the guard said. “This is what falling in love feels like.”
The convict laughed and kissed him softly, first on the neck, then the mouth. It went on forever.
Contributors
Laird Barron
Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska, where he raced the Iditarod three times during the early 1990s and worked in the fishing and construction industries. He is the author of several books, including The Imago Sequence, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and Swift to Chase. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Barron currently resides in the Hudson Valley writing stories about the evil that men do.
T om Cardamone
Tom Cardamone is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning speculative novella Green Thumb and the erotic fantasy novel The Werewolves of Central Park as well as the novella Pacific Rimming. His short story collection, Pumpkin Teeth, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Black Quill Award.
Additionally, he has edited The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered and the anthology Lavender Menace: Tales of Queer Villainy! which was nominated for the Over the Rainbow List by the LGBT Round Table of the American Library Association.
Lambda Literary described his 2016 collection, Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe, as “a heady mix of subtle, understated wonder, unmitigated horror, and powerful eroticism, with each story working its individual magic on the reader.”
His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, some of which have been collected on his website www.pumpkinteeth.net.
E rastes
Born in Essex, England in 1959, Erastes attended Southend High School for Girls.Erastes is the penname of a female author who lives in Norfolk, UK. She drew her inspiration to write historical fiction from works such as Gaywyck by Vincent Virga and the novels of Mary Renault. Erastes was the Director of the Erotic Authors Association for two years and is an active member of the Historical Novel Society. She is the moderator of Speak Its Name, an influential blog dedicated to gay historical fiction.Erastes has been writing since 2003, and details of all her books and short stories can be found on her website, www.erastes.com.
G emma Files
Former film critic and teacher turned award-winning horror author Gemma Files is probably best known for her QUILTBAG-friendly Weird Western Hexslinger Series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones, all from ChiZine Publications). She has also written two collections of short fiction (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart) and a story cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven), published by CZP as well, plus two chapbooks of speculative poetry. Her most recent novel, Experimental Film, was released in 2015. Naturally, it’s from CZP.
M ichael Hacker
Michael Hacker lives in Los Angeles where he works for an international law firm that litigated in favor of marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. His story “Vourdalak” appeared in the Bram Stoker Award winning anthology, Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, published by Dark Scribe Press. Currently Michael is building a career as an audio book narrator and recently collaborated with Lisa Morton on the audio book production of Malediction, her Bram Stoker nominated second novel. You can view other titles he has narrated on his website: www.michael-hacker.com.
C had Helder
Chad Helder is the author of The Pop-Up Book of Death, The Vampire Bridegroom, and Bartholomew of the Scissors. With Vince Liaguno, Helder co-edited Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology.
G reg Herren
Greg Herren is an award winning author/editor who lives in New Orleans. He has won the Lambda Literary Award twice (nominated 14 times), has been a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and has won two medals from the Independent Press Moonbeam awards for young adult mystery/horror. His most recent book is Garden District Gothic, from Bold Strokes Books.
B rad C. Hodson
Originally from Tennessee, Brad C. Hodson currently hangs his hat in sunny Southern California. He's done rewriting and script-doctoring work for a dozen movies you've never heard of and a feature adaptation of his first novel Darling is currently in pre-production. For information on where to find more of his fiction, please visit brad-hodson.com/bibliography
S tephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen novels and six story collections. Most recent is the novella Mapping the Interior, from Tor.com, and the comic book My Hero, from Hex Publishers.
Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
H elen Marshall
Helen Marshall is a Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. Her first collection of fiction Hair Side, Flesh Side won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, and Gifts for the One Who Comes After, her second collection, won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015. She is currently editing The Year’s Best Weird Fiction to be released in 2017, and her debut novel Everything that is Born will be published by Random House Canada in 2018.
M arshall Moore
Marshall Moore is the author of three novels (Bitter Orange, An Ideal for Living, and The Concrete Sky) and three short-fiction collections (A Garden Fed by Lightning, The Infernal Republic, and Black Shapes in a Darkened Room). Sagome Nere, an Italy-only collection of Moore's short fiction in translation, was published by 96, Rue de-la-Fontaine Edizioni in 2017. With Xu Xi, he is the co-editor of the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University in Wales. For more information, please visit: www.marshallmoore.com.
L isa Morton
Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, Bram Stoker Award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her most recent books include Ghosts: A Haunted History and the short story collection CD Select: Lisa Morton. Forthcoming from Doubleday/Blumhouse is Haunted Nights, an anthology co-edited with Ellen Datlow. She lives in North Hills, California, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com.
D avid Nickle
David Nickle is the author of numerous short stories and several novels. His short fiction has appeared at Tor.com, Cemetery Dance, and most recently in anthologies such as Aickman's Heirs, Children of Lovecraft, and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, as well as The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and Best Horror of the Year. His stories have been collected in Monstrous Affections, and Knife Fight and Other Struggles, and his most recent novel is Volk: A Novel of Radiant Abomination, all from Chizine Publications. He lives and works in Toronto as a journalist.
R .B. Payne
Assembled from body parts stolen from the Los Angeles Coroner’s dumpster, and stitched together with razor wire, R.B. Payne lives in hope of becoming human. Meanwhile, he writes.
His work can be found in anthologies such as All American Horror of the 21st Century: The First Decade and Times of Trouble, and he’s very proud of his analysis of three 1930′s black-and-white slasher films in Butcher Knives and Body Counts. Recent work is featured in Expiration Date, Madhouse, Hell Comes to Hollywood II, Dark Discoveries, and 18 Wheels of Horror which
is available in truck stops everywhere.
More short stories are in the publishing pipeline and a novel is on the near horizon. Up-to-date information can be found at www.rbpayne.com.
E van J. Peterson
Evan J. Peterson's latest book, The PrEP Diaries: A Safe(r) Sex Memoir, will be released in May 2017 by Lethe Press. He is a Clarion West alum and author of the horror poetry chapbooks Skin Job and The Midnight Channel as well as editor of the Lambda Literary finalist Ghosts in Gaslight, Monsters in Steam: Gay City 5. His writing has also appeared in Weird Tales, Queers Destroy Horror, The Book of Three Gates, Nightmare Magazine, Boing Boing, and Best Gay Stories 2015. Evanjpeterson.com can tell you more.
N orman Prentiss
Norman Prentiss is the author of the queer road-trip fantasy, Odd Adventures with Your Other Father, and the forthcoming Life in a Haunted House. He won a 2010 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction for his first book, Invisible Fences. Previously he won a Stoker in the Short Fiction category for “In the Porches of My Ears,” which originally appeared in Postscripts 18. Other publications include the novella The Fleshless Man, a mini-collection Four Legs in the Morning, a chapter in the round-robin novella The Crane House: A Halloween Story, The Narrator (with Michael McBride), The Halloween Children (with Brian James Freeman) and anthology appearances in Dark Screams Volume Two, Four Zombies, Four Halloweens, Dark Fusions, All-American Horror of the 21st Century, Blood Lite 3, Zombies vs. Robots: This Means War, Horror Drive-In: An All-Night Short Story Marathon, Black Static, Commutability, Damned Nation, Tales from the Gorezone, Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and four editions of the Shivers anthology series. His poetry has appeared in Writer Online, Southern Poetry Review, Baltimore's City Paper, and A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock.
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