Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

Their plan for the evening had been to destroy a bottle of vodka in the woods, then Billy and Vance would do Donna from both ends. Donna dug that sort of thing when she was sufficiently wasted. When they awoke several years later in their unearthed boxes, they renewed their pleasure as soon as they could scare up some more liquor. They wandered into a roadside outlet known as the 1-Stop Brew Shoppe and Vance broke bottles over the head of the proprietor until the guy stopping breathing. Then Donna lit out for the Yard, a quadrangle of trees and picnic benches near most of the churches in town. The Yard was Triple Pines’ preferred salon for dropouts fond of cannabis, and Donna felt certain she could locate an old beau or two lingering among the waistoids there. Besides, she could bend in interesting new ways, now.

Billy had sought and duly targeted Vanessa Billings, one of those booster/cheerleader bitches who would never have anything to do with his like. She had graduated in ’02 and was still – still! – living in her parents’ house. It was a kick to see her jaw gape in astonishment at the sight of him. Omigod, you like died! It was even more of a kick to hold her by the throat and fuck her until she croaked, the stuck-up little cuntling. Getting Vanessa out of her parents’ house caused a bit of ruckus, so Billy killed them, too.

Ultimately, the trio racked up so many new corpses to fill their vacant graves they needed to steal a pickup truck to ferry them all back to Hollymount. Their victims would all be back soon enough, and the fun could begin again.

None of them had a precise cognition of what they needed to do. It was more along the lines of an ingrained need – like a craving – to take the heat of the living to avoid reverting to the coldness of death. That, and the idea of refreshing their grave plots with new bodies. Billy had always had more cunning than intelligence, but the imperatives were not that daunting. Stupid dogs learned tricks in less time.

Best of all, after he finished billing Billings, Billy found he still had a boner. Death was apparently better than Viagra; he had an all-night hard-on. And since the night was still a toddler, he began to hunt for other chicks he could bill.

The sun came up. The sun went down. Billy thought of that rhyme about how the worms play pinochle on your snout . Fucking worms. How about the worms eat your asshole inside-out . For starters. Billy had been one super-sized organ smorgasbord, and had suffered every delicious bite. Now a whole fuckload of Triple Pines’ good, upstanding citizens were going to pay, pay, pay.

As day and night blended and passed, Triple Pines continued to mutate.

Over at the Ready-Set Dinette, a pink neon sign continued to blink the word EAT, just as it had before things changed in Triple Pines.

Deputy Lee Beecher (the late) and RaeAnn (also the late) came in for lunch as usual. The next day, Constable Dickey (recently deceased) and the new deputy, James Trainor (ditto), joined them.

Vanessa Billings became Billy Morrison’s main squeeze, and what with Vance and Donna’s hangers-on, they had enough to form a new kind of gang. In the next few days, they would start breaking windows and setting fires.

Over at Callahan’s, Craignotti continued to find fresh meat for the digging crew as the original members dropped out. Miguel Ayala had lasted three days before he claimed to have snagged a better job. Big Boyd Cooper stuck – he was a rationalist at heart, not predisposed to superstitious fears or anything else in the path of Getting the Job Done. Jacky Tynan had apparently taken sick.

Joe had packed his saddlebags and gunned his panhead straight out of town, without calling Doug, or anyone.

In the Gudgell household, every day, a pattern commenced. In the morning, Conroy Gudgell would horsewhip his treacherous wife’s naked ass, and in the evening, Ellen Gudgell would murder her husband, again and again, over and over. The blood drenching the inside of their house was not ectoplasm. It continued to accrete, layer upon layer, as one day passed into another.

In the middle of the night, Doug felt askew on the inside, and made the mistake of taking his own temperature with a thermometer.

Eighty-seven point-five degrees.

“Yeah, you’ll run a little cold,” said Michelle, from behind him. “I’m sorry about that. It’s sort of a downside. Or maybe you caught something. Do you feel sick?”

“No, I—” Doug faltered. “I just feel shagged. Weak.”

“You’re not a weak man.”

“Stop it.” He turned, confrontational. He did not want to do anything to alienate her. But. “This is serious. What if I start losing core heat? Four or five degrees is all it takes, then I’m as dead as a Healthy Choice entrée. What the hell is happening, Michelle? What haven’t you told me?”

“I don’t know ,” she said. Her eyes brightened with tears. “I’m not sure . I didn’t come back with a goddamned manual. I’m afraid that if I go ahead and do the next thing, the thing I feel I’m supposed to do . . . that I’ll lose you.”

Panic cinched his heart. “What’s the next thing?!”

“I was avoiding it. I was afraid to bring it up. Maybe I was enjoying this too much, what we have right now, in this isolated bubble of time.”

He held her. She wanted to reject simple comfort, but succumbed. “Just . . . tell me. Say it, whatever it is. Then it’s out in the world and we can deal with it.”

“It’s about Rochelle.”

Doug nodded, having prepared for this one. “You miss her. I know. But we can’t do anything about it. There’d be no way to explain it.”

“I want her back.” Michelle’s head was down, the tears coursing freely now.

“I know, baby, I know . . . I miss her, too. I wanted you guys to move in with me. Both of you. From here we could move anywhere, so long as it’s out of this deathtrap of a town. Neither of us likes it here very much. I figured, in the course of time—”

She slumped on the bed, hands worrying each other atop her bare legs. “It was my dream, through all those hours, days, that things had happened differently, and we had hooked up, and we all got to escape. It would be great if you were just a means to an end; you know – just another male guy-person, to manipulate. Great if I didn’t care about you; great if I didn’t actually love you.”

“I had to explain your death to Rochelle. There’s no going back from that one. Look at it this way: she’s with your mother, and she seemed like a nice lady.”

When her gaze came up to meet his, her eyes were livid. “You don’t know anything,” she said, the words constricted and bitter. “Sweet, kindly old Grandma Farrier? She’s a fucking sadist who has probably shot pornos with Rochelle by now.”

“What?!” Doug’s jaw unhinged.

“She is one sick piece of shit, and her mission was always to get Rochelle away from me, into her clutches. I ran away from home as soon as I could. And when I had Rochelle, I swore that bitch would never get her claws on my daughter. And you just . . . handed her over.”

“Now, wait a minute, Michelle . . .”

She overrode him. “No – it’s not your fault. She always presented one face to the world. Her fake face. Her human masque. Inside the family with the doors closed, it was different. You saw the masque. You dealt with the masque. So did Rochelle. Until Grandma could actually strap the collar on, she had to play it sneaky. Her real face is from a monster who needed to be inside a grave decades ago. I should know – she broke me in with a heated glass dildo when I was nine.”

“Holy shit. Michelle, why didn’t you tell me this before?”