Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Jensen crawled headfirst into the wall beside the doorway. “ Where am I? I can’t see !”

Newsome was sitting up, looking bewildered. “What’s going on? What happened?” He pushed Rideout’s head off him. The reverend slid bone-lessly from the bed to the floor.

Melissa bent over him.

“ Don’t do that !” Kat shouted, but it was too late.

She didn’t know if the thing was truly a god or just some weird kind of leech, but it was fast. It came out from under the bed, rolled along Rideout’s shoulder, onto Melissa’s hand, and up her arm. Melissa tried to shake it off and couldn’t. Some kind of sticky stuff on those stubby little spikes , the part of Kat’s brain that would still work told the part — the much larger part — that still wouldn’t. Like the glue on a fly’s feet .

Melissa had seen where the thing came from and even in her panic was wise enough to cover her own mouth with both hands. The thing skittered up her neck, over her cheek, and squatted on her left eye. The wind screamed and Melissa screamed with it. It was the cry of a woman drowning in the kind of pain the charts in the hospitals can never describe. The charts go from one to ten; Melissa’s agony was well over one hundred — that of someone being boiled alive. She staggered backwards, clawing at the thing on her eye. It was pulsing faster now, and Kat could hear a low, liquid sound as the thing resumed feeding. It was a slushy sound.

It doesn’t care who it eats , she thought, just as if this made sense. Kat realised she was walking toward the screaming, flailing woman, and observed this phenomenon with interest.

“Hold still! Melissa, HOLD STILL !”

Melissa paid no attention. She continued to back up. She struck the thick branch now visiting the room and went sprawling. Kat went to one knee beside her and brought the broomhandle smartly down on Melissa’s face. Down on the thing that was feeding on Melissa’s eye.

There was a splatting sound, and suddenly the thing was sliding limply down the housekeeper’s cheek, leaving a wet trail of slime behind. It moved across the leaf-littered floor, intending to hide under the branch the way it had hidden under the bed. Kat sprang to her feet and stepped on it. She felt it splatter beneath her sturdy New Balance walking shoe. Green stuff shot out in both directions, as if she had stepped on a small balloon filled with snot.

Kat went down again, this time on both knees, and took Melissa in her arms. At first Melissa struggled, and Kat felt a fist graze her ear. Then Melissa subsided, breathing harshly. “Is it gone? Kat, is it gone?”

“I feel better,” Newsome said wonderingly from behind them, in some other world.

“Yes, it’s gone,” Kat said. She peered into Melissa’s face. The eye the thing had landed on was bloodshot, but otherwise it looked all right. “Can you see?”

“Yes. It’s blurry, but clearing. Kat… the pain… it was all through me. It was like the end of the world.”

“Somebody needs to flush my eyes!” Jensen yelled. He sounded indignant.

“Flush your own eyes,” Newsome said cheerily. “You’ve got two good legs, don’t you? I think I might, too, once Kat throws them back into gear. Somebody check on Rideout. I think the poor sonofabitch might be dead.”

Melissa was staring up at Kat, one eye blue, the other red and leaking tears. “The pain… Kat, you have no idea of the pain.”

“Yes,” Kat said. “Actually, I do. Now.” She left Melissa sitting by the branch and went to Rideout. She checked for a pulse and found nothing, not even the wild waver of a heart that is still trying its best. Rideout’s pain, it seemed, was over.

The generator went out.

“Fuck,” Newsome said, still sounding cheery. “I paid seventy thousand dollars for that Jap piece of shit.”

“ I need someone to flush my eyes !” Jensen bellowed “ Kat !”

Kat opened her mouth to reply, then didn’t. In the new darkness, something had crawled onto the back of her hand.

She felt the storm come in, in her kneecaps, then her thighs. By eight o’clock, it blew from the north into Sunrise, January-hard and fine like sand, and Cora’s hip was aching.

She asked Johnny Red for a smoke break and limped out back to the storeroom, kneading the hip with her right hand while her left cupped the cigarette. The storeroom was cold and cluttered, a tiny junkyard of boxes and broken chairs, but normally it was quiet; the rattle of pots in Johnny Red’s kitchen didn’t quite reach through the door. Tonight, though, the back door banged like an angry drunk; the snow hissed and ground at metal, brick, bone. Cora lit a second thin-rolled smoke off the first and listened to the rattle of the heartbroke wind.

When she came back through the storeroom door, half her tables had up and left.

“Better service across the street?” she asked. The plates were half-full, still steaming. There was nothing across the street. There was nowhere else to eat in the whole town: just the service stations, the Tutchos’ grocery, and the snow.

“Transport truck’s gone off the road,” Johnny said behind the counter, and crimped a new coffee filter into the brew basket. A few hairs pulled loose from his straight black ponytail and drifted into his face; he brushed them back with a callused brown hand. “The boys went to haul it to Fiddler’s.”

Georgie Fiddler ran one of the two service stations in town. Mike Blondin, who ran the other, was still at his table, hands wrapped thin around a chipped blue pottery mug. He held it up and Cora grabbed the stained coffeepot.

“I want the fresh stuff,” he complained; she didn’t answer, just filled the mug with sour, black coffee. He waved her off before it hit the brim and flipped open the dented metal sugar tin.

“You didn’t go out with them,” she said. Not a question.

Mike Blondin’s fingers moved like a stonecarver’s, measured sugar with chisel precision: one pinch, two. He had big hands. “Wouldn’t want to just abandon you,” he grinned. There’d been a time, not too many years past, when Mikey Blondin’s grin had got him whatsoever he desired anywhere from Sunrise to the Alberta border.

“Thoughtful,” she said, dry, just as Johnny Red hit the percolator button and called out, “What’m I, chopped liver?” Gertie Myers, back at the corner table, rolled her eyes. Cora ignored it all and covered the cooling plates.

An hour passed before the menfolk trickled back in, red-faced and damp with winter-sweat. “Hey,” Johnny Red said, and ladled out eight bowls of steaming chicken soup. “What’s the news?”

“Went hard into the ditch,” Fred Tutcho replied, and sucked back soup straight from the bowl. The steam set the ice in his eyelashes to melting. “Georgie got the tow and we managed to fish it out, but the front axle’s pretty busted.”

“The driver?” Cora asked.

“Got him up at Jane’s.” Jane Hooker ran the Treeline Motel, which was ten rooms and a Dene crafts shop, old-style porcupine quill-and-hair work, out by Blondin’s. In the deep wintertime most of her rooms were closed; the only visitors to Sunrise in January were family and the odd long-haul trucker. “She’n Georgie are checking him out.”

“I’ll bring them something, then,” Cora said, and ducked into the kitchen. She filled three thermoses and screwed the lids on tight, shrugged on her long, thick, battered coat. She wound three scarves and a hat about her head before stepping out into the storm.

It wasn’t enough. The storm cut. It had blown in from the north, where there weren’t no buildings or shrubs — whitebark pines or larches — to beat down the wind. Even breathing through thick wool, Cora’s nostrils froze together at the first sucked-in breath, and her jeans were stiff by the time she reached the Treeline Motel. There was only one light on. Cora hunkered deeper into her scarves and scooted, knees-bent against the slippery gravel, down the battered row of doors with fingers clamped around her canvas bag.