Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“Okayokayokayokayokay… ,” Jason Good’s words floated around somewhere above Lyle. He heard the man drop down and start tossing pillows around. “Get dressed,” Good said, his voice full of both confidence and urgency. “We’ve gotta clear out. Where the fuck is my other sock?”

“What? We have to call nine-one-one!”

“You shot your husband in the head, Olivia! With a stupid hand-cannon as loud as a goddamn A-bomb, Olivia! Some neighbor has definitely already called nine-one-one. Responders will be here in under seven minutes. We need to be as far and deniable from here as possible in seven minutes, Olivia.”

Lyle heard her leap from the bed. The bang of the headboard against the drywall reverberated, as though he was in a long metallic hallway. Oh, he thought. I’m dying now .

“Go where?” Olivia shouted, hangers clattering in the closet.

“I don’t—” Good stopped throwing pillows. “What about that place you share with your sisters, that cottage near Calcutta?”

“What about it?” she asked, her voice momentarily muffled as she pulled on a sweater. “Calcutta is to hell and gone!”

“Exactly—” Good began, but Lyle missed the rest as he finally succumbed to blood loss.

Lyle Awoke. It was painfully apparent that he was not dead. There were no cops or EMTs wandering around trying to figure out what the hell had happened, so he assumed he’d been unconscious for under seven minutes. As his vision cleared, Lyle found himself staring under the bed, the dust ruffle tickling his nose. Just inches away lay a detective’s badge on its leather belt-clip placard, J. GOOD emblazoned across the bottom. And on the far side of the bed, just in front of the bedside table, was a nickel-plated revolver, the Taurus .45 Public Defender he’d bought, put in the bedside table, and not thought of since.

He reached under the bed for the forgotten badge, then carefully circled around for the pistol. Lyle didn’t particularly want these things, but leaving them lying there seemed fundamentally wrong.

He caught his reflection in Olivia’s vanity mirror and was astounded by how bad he looked.

There was a long lash-mark across his left cheek where his wife’s bullet had grazed him before mostly tearing off his ear, which now dangled upside down from the still-attached lobe. He carefully reached for the ear with his left hand, then thought better of it and instead vomited on the thick cream carpeting. His face was numb, not the roaring mask of pain he expected. Maybe that was a good sign?

The one time Olivia and Lyle had gone to her family place near Calcutta, they’d attended a rodeo and seen an amateur bullrider almost lose an ear while trying to last eight seconds on the back of a speckled bull named “Hot for Teacher.” The bull had thrown the kid in just under two seconds, hooking the rider’s helmet in the process and tossing it into the bleachers, despite the straps staying steadfastly buckled. The waiting EMTs—neither of whom had looked a day older than the gawky bullrider they were patching up, all three of whom seemed ready to puke—had glued the torn ear back in place using generic superglue. Not twenty minutes later, Lyle had seen the dazed kid wandering the midway with his buddies, drinking a large Pepsi from a paper cup, his hat pulled down low at an odd angle so the hatband could hold his ear in place while the glue set.

Lyle stumbled to his kitchen. He pawed through the junk drawer, found an expired bottle of Tylenol 3 with codeine, washed one down with a warm slug of Gatorade, pocketed the bottle, pawed further, came up with a tube of superglue, and went to the bright half-bath just off their entryway.

A week ago, his wife had hung one of those little framed inspirational “Footprints” poems next to the mirror. It was the one about Jesus, where the speaker recounts a dream where she’s walking down the beach, two sets of footprints trailing behind her. But during the worst passages of her life she looks back and there’s only one set of prints, and she feels totally abandoned.

Lyle considered this as he twisted the cap off the glue and leaned toward the mirror. The poem suddenly felt portentous—although he wondered how much of that was due to the cocktail of codeine, Gatorade, and adrenaline stewing in his guts.

To his surprise, reattaching the ear was remarkably similar to reattaching a teacup handle—which was what he’d bought the glue for originally. Afterward he opened the hall closet, grabbed a Toledo Mud Hens stocking cap, and pulled it on, pinning his loose ear to the side of his head.

Lyle heard the approach of distant sirens. He hustled into his Prius and out of his neighborhood. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, or to file a police report. For that matter, he didn’t particularly want to go chasing after his wife and Detective Jason Good.

But he’d walked in on them having sex and, in contradiction to every country or blues song ever recorded, he’d somehow been the one who got shot over it. This felt fundamentally unfair.

Now he had a gun in his pocket and a full tank of gas. It looked an awful lot like the Universe might be trying to give him a nudge in the right direction.

At the very least, he deserved an explanation.

And that explanation was headed to Calcutta.

After several hours, Lyle had finally begun to accept the possibility that the Universe had no particular plan, and he’d likely never find his wife’s family’s cottage.

Then he glanced up from tuning the radio and saw the bucking woman dangling from that neglected field’s single misshapen tree. Arms bound at her waist, she threw herself against the crisp spring air, her spasms both frantic and hopeless.

“Olivia?” he said, absolutely certain—illogical as it was—that he was seeing his wife being hanged in a fallow field next to a slouching barn.

He hit the brakes and veered onto the soft shoulder. The loose gravel sucked at the wheels, but he managed to bring the car to a shuddering stop rather than flip it into the deep drainage ditch. Lyle was out before he knew what he was doing, vaulting the culvert, charging across the stubble, the heavy pistol battering his hip.

It was almost immediately obvious that the woman was not his wife. Even as a distant silhouette, she was clearly too old, too scrawny, her hair all wrong. But Lyle did not flag. He was moving on instinct, and moving on instinct felt okay—or, at least, it felt better than feeling nothing. He’d slowly realized that feeling nothing felt terrible .

Racing closer, Lyle saw the aluminum A-frame ladder tumbled beneath the hanged woman. He poured his last ounce of panic into a sprint, and without thinking—he would certainly have botched it if he had—Lyle vaulted from the ground to the fallen ladder’s side rail, took a wild leap, grabbed hold of the cord a good two feet above the old woman’s head, and held on for dear life. The branch sagged a few inches, landing the woman’s feet firmly on the ladder rail. Then the limb snapped with a soggy crack, dumping them both onto the hard earth.

Lyle immediately rolled on top of the thrashing woman, trying to worm his fingers between the noose and her throat. Her face was a swollen purple caricature. One of her arms had come loose in the fall, but the other remained lashed to her waist by a complicated set of thin leather straps and buckles. Their hands bashed and stumbled over each other as they struggled to loosen the noose. It wasn’t even rope, Lyle discovered, but instead a length of salvaged Ethernet cable, sticky with age.