Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

When he returned, she had the bag on the bed and was stuffing clothes into it. She looked up from what she was doing. Her brow knitted as she saw the gun in his hand. “Are they here already?”

He raised the pistol and fired.

FRIDAY

Sweat moistened the shirt on his head, but the cloth kept it from dripping in his eyes while he watched the road. He’d scanned the weeds and the far edges of the property with the rifle scope, but he wasn’t catching sight of the tiger. He’d thought for certain Val’s body and the promise of an easy meal would lure it out, but it had been forty minutes and it hadn’t taken the bait. He wondered whether it had wandered off, looking for other prey. There was no shortage of horses and cattle in the countryside around the county. Sheep and a few alpacas too. He decided he’d give it another twenty minutes, and then he was going to try sneaking out to get away. And then he saw it.

It was stalking around the opposite side of the house by the barn, instead of where he’d seen it when he tried to take the shot with the pistol. His heart thumped harder at the sight of it. The thing was big and moved like liquid. It was beautiful and terrifying. A perfect thing. He almost regretted having to kill it.

The tiger slowed its pace and lowered its head as it came closer to Val’s body, sniffing at her. Orrin centred the crosshairs on the top of its skull and waited.

What are you waiting for? Dig in.

The animal looked around as if it was trying to figure out where Val had come from. It reached out with a paw and grabbed at her. Val’s body jerked like it was a child’s doll and the tiger bit down on her neck and quickly started to drag her back the way it had come. At the edge of the road near the weeds, it plopped down and tore off a long strip of her flesh.

Bile burbled up Orrin’s throat, stinging and threatening to choke him.

He swallowed, re-aimed, and squeezed the trigger.

The sound in the bedroom was deafening and he thought he might have let out a yelp of pain, though he didn’t hear it if he did. His ears were dead and ringing; his head hurt a little. He pushed past all of that to pull back on the bolt handle and eject the spent casing. He shoved the bolt back into place and chambered a new round. Through the scope he saw the tiger lying next to Val. A pool of dark blood was spreading from its skull and muddying up the dirt. He contemplated putting another round in it, but deaf or not, the rifle was loud, and he didn’t want to risk attracting any more attention than that shot might’ve already. Even this far out in the boonies people didn’t like hearing rifle reports near where their kids got off the bus, or where they were grazing their livestock.

He stood up and shook out his legs. His knees and his fist ached. The ride home was going to be long. But it didn’t matter. It was going to be the best ride of his life. He’d just killed a fucking tiger. None of his brothers were ever going to be able to top that no matter how many points the next buck had. He just had to trade rifles and he could get on his way.

Earlier in the day.

FRIDAY

Raymond ran out the back as soon as he heard the motorcycle pulling up the drive. He’d just about given up hope that Bunker was coming. He pulled the keys out of his pocket and looked at his zoo. He thought that he’d miss his cats. But then, probably not.

“Time to raise hell.”

FRIDAY

Orrin stepped out onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind him and took a deep breath of fresh air. He walked down the steps, not looking over at where he’d shot the tiger. He’d made sure it was dead before he came down from his roost. He’d put the rifle back in the gun cabinet and took the Mossberg along with the ammo. It wouldn’t do for the cops to find shells for a shotgun that wasn’t in the house. He wrapped the box of shells in his T-shirt and stuffed that into his saddlebag. The shotgun he tied to the side of the bike with bungee cords. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d get him home.

He swung a leg over the bike and turned the key. The engine roared to life and he twisted the throttle. His hearing was coming back slowly, but it was still muffled. Between that and his pipes, he never heard the animal behind him.

When it pulled him off the seat into the tall grass he had no idea what was happening until he was already on his back. Everything was a blur. He felt claws puncturing his jacket and his flesh underneath. He felt its hot breath, and then the thing’s teeth biting down on his neck. Orrin wanted to reach for his pistol, but it was under him in the holster at the small of his back. He beat uselessly against the animal with his fists. He struggled and kicked but the tiger knelt down on its elbows and held him there. He tried to gasp for breath, but the jaws holding him were tight and he couldn’t breathe.

He felt a hard tug at his leg and a searing pain as his leathers ripped open and a long muscle tore away from his bone. Another tug. The tiger that had taken him down tightened its hold on his neck. The sound of his spine breaking echoed inside his own skull like when he’d bite down on a piece of gristle. It was a vibration from inside his body, not a sound outside.

The bright day grew dim, even though the sun wouldn’t be going down for hours. And he slipped away while the other hungry tigers ate him, leaving nothing left in his life to come.

Before that, he had been a man who would have liked to have taken a last ride.

Long before that, he had been a boy who loved his bicycle, and the feeling like flying when he rode it down the tall hill behind his house and took his hands off the handlebars.

And earlier still, he was a child and occasionally his mother held him and whispered to him, her breath tickling his ear like a warm bourbon breeze.

And before that, he wasn’t yet born and was exactly like he was now.

Gone in silence, as though he never existed.

Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in such publications as Interzone , Black Static , Albedo One , Nightmare Magazine , The Dark , Mithila Review and on Tor.com . Her work has been anthologised in several volumes of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year , in Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror , in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014 , Steve Haynes’ Best British Fantasy 2014 and Johnny Main’s Best British Horror 2015 . Her stories have also been on many of Locus’s Recommended Reading Lists. Her story “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. A collection of her short fiction, All the Fabulous Beasts , is available from Undertow Publications.

Stephen Volkis probably best known for the notorious BBC drama Ghostwatch (called by some the most terrifying drama ever seen on TV) and as creator and lead writer of the award-winning ITV drama series Afterlife starring Andrew Lincoln and Lesley Sharp. He wrote ITV’s three-part chiller Midwinter of the Spirit starring Anna Maxwell Martin and David Threlfall, and has penned numerous feature screenplays, including ghost story The Awakening starring Rebecca Hall and Dominic West, and Ken Russell’s Gothic , while his other TV work includes Channel 4’s Shockers. His play The Chapel of Unrest premiered at the Bush Theatre starring Jim Broadbent and Reece Shearsmith. He is the winner of two British Fantasy Awards and a BAFTA. His stories are collected in Dark Corners , Monsters in the Heart and The Parts We Play . His three novellas comprising The Dark Masters trilogy ( Whitstable , Leytonstone and Netherwood ) will be published by PS in late 2018.