Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Read online

  OFFICE BUILDING

  A rumble above, like God’s coughing, and we instinctively look up, bearing our necks, opening our mouths, squinting over noses. But when your office building collapses above you, you’re lucky if you get to enjoy a moment of sky before you drown in all that falling furniture, that flurry of floorboards, that frenzy of friends.

  SEAHORSES

  Seahorses are the zombified torsos of retired ancient Roman centurion stallions that were dismembered and given an ocean burial. I know this because a troop of them ganged together and head-butted me into unconsciousness before they chewed off my limbs. Now I am a seahuman. I ride the nightmares, galloping the seven seas for brains.

  ARCHERY

  I am found five hundred and fifty-five years into the future, skeleton impaled to a petrified tree by a high tech arrow amazingly engineered to take down a mutant grizzly bear in just one shot! But there aren’t any bears anymore so no one understands these relics of war: my empty skull, this godforsaken arrow.

  AMUSEMENT PARK RIDE #6: THE HAUNTED HOUSE

  The Haunted House ride is for babies: a carriage tour of plastic cut-outs—creatures that slowly spring out and weakly scream at you in the dark.

  But I’m locked in the cart. It never stops. On the fiftieth tour, I cry for help from the people in line, but they just glare at me, bored.

  FATE

  My mystic draws the final card of my tarot spread … and gasps.

  I expected the Death card, but it’s the Hanging Man.

  I drop my head in relief.

  She reads the cards. “There’s a traitor in your life …”

  And then the assassin above lets go of his rope and falls, katana swinging toward my neck.

  FIRE

  Any last words?

  “I get ‘dust to dust.’ Our cells are living dust. And dead skin is even floating in the dust. But what’s with ‘ashes to ashes’? Who’s made up of ashes? Not even this cigarette. Sure, there’s cremation. But shouldn’t we say ‘dust to ash’? Or ‘creme to creme’? Or …”

  Ready … Aim … Fire!

  GIANT MUTANT TICKS

  Ticks are lazy. They loiter in brush, hopping a ride if they’re lucky, and burying their head in their dinner plate. But giant mutant ticks are different. They bloat so big that they eventually grow appendages on their back larger than yours, and after you’re drained they carry you to the bus stop and wait.

  POLITICAL ANIMALS

  I am being trampled to death by elephants chasing—and being chased back by—donkeys.

  In this sick circus, an Uncle Sam clown directs me to a red lever.

  That lever decides which beast lives.

  I crawl amid the tumult. Grab it. Pull …

  But voted for neither.

  A trap door opens and I am hung.

  AMUSEMENT PARK RIDE #7: TUNNEL OF LOVE

  The neon sign above the cavernous ride entrance reads Tunnel of Love. Pink light laps the waves around our boat as I hug my lover closer, hoping she’ll kiss me inside.

  The sign splashes into the water, electrifying the moat.

  We sizzle and spasm in shock—and in the air between us, we swap spit.

  LEAF PILE

  What a tall pile of leaves! I must dive in! The fluffy crackle of it all is exhilarating. There’s nothing on Earth like leaves tussling in a feathery plume, browning the air above while I tumble in red flannel and oak. But this red is blood. A steel rake fingers my spine. Help! I’ve fallen.

  SPACKLE

  I have drums of spackle in my shop. So when I accidentally shot my hand with a nail gun, I was thankful. I plugged the bloody hole with so much I could feel the grit crunching between my knuckles. But when I later pulled the pink plug, I fainted and painted the floor with blood.

  INSOMNIA

  I rolled my tired eyes beneath their lids and turned to cliché: counting sheep. One by one, the fuzzy balls of yarn happily hopped a fence. I think I was put to sleep around five hundred and fifty-five, because then, en masse, the herd attacked, smothering me beneath a gigantic, writhing pillow of living wool.

  BONES

  The femur is the most painful bone, of course, but size doesn’t matter. Any bone with girth could be used as a club, sure, but even a knuckle could be sharpened to shiv. But it’s not about pain. It’s about the embarrassment of being boned to death by another man. Especially your wife’s paramour’s pelvis.

  AMUSEMENT PARK RIDE #8: LOG FLUME

  It feels like milling around aimlessly in 1950s kitsch at first, but soon the cool and chaotic splashing is pleasant as the flume picks up speed. Channels of water propel our hollow log up a tall slope to the finale: a dead-dropping splashdown before an awaiting logging saw that mists the audience with our blood.

  ASPHYXIATION

  My murderer shoves a retail bag over my head, tied off with a zip cord. My mouth sucks only plastic—no air. He lets me lumber around the room, struggling for breath, seeking escape. It’s a bag from Target. The bullseye logo is over my face; through it I see a shadow aiming a gun.

  DRILL

  The driller killer really means business, wearing his construction cap, goggles, apron, and gloves. He has me secured, spread-eagled atop a large, laminated U.S. map on the floor. He surgically drills his holes and places tiny wooden lattices above each wound. He dances action figures under the spurting red geysers of my blood, crying “Oil!”

  DIABETES

  The needle disposal bin above the paper towels is brimming with hypos. Disgusting. How many diabetics are in this casino?

  A stall bursts open. A haggard man approaches, needles porcupining from both fists.

  I direct him to the overstuffed bin.

  “Sugar!” he shouts, knocking me down, jabbing them in and sucking out my blood. “Sugar!”

  SUET CAKE

  I’m in a drugged stupor when my neighbor submerges me in her bathtub brimming with lard. She empties sacks of seed over my chest, weighting me down in the muck. I awaken in her backyard, frozen solid in a block of hardened fat. A starling lands. It considers my eyes the entire time it pecks.

  AMUSEMENT PARK RIDE #9: BUMPER CARS

  I am climbing out of my cart when I’m gently bumped, and trip out onto the concrete. An oncoming cluster bumps chaotically against one another, dimly reminding me of TV commercials for “scrubbing bubbles”—when one cracks my skull, and another smears my brains under his rubbery carriage like foamy bird shit beneath a squeegee.

  CAFFEINE

  What the glorious fuck do you mean you won’t sell me another extra-large caramel mocha triple shot latte? I demand to talk to your manager! What?! You’re the manager? The only thing you’ve managed to do is fuck up everything I’ve ordered all day. WHAT?! You think I’m gonna overdose on caffeine? You can’t overdo …

  AUDIOBOOK

  It takes a minute for me to realize those high beams ahead are actually on my side of the interstate—and then I’m sailing through a shower of glass, another, my head finally slamming another man’s dashboard. A nearby speaker still plays an audiobook. It’s some self-help crap, about attaining a better life through hypnosis.

  VIRGIN SACRIFICE

  We both have pierced noses and tattoos, but the tribal chieftain is not my friend.

  “I’m not a virgin!” I cry from the volcano’s rim.

  “Dunka-punka!” he shouts.

  His gobbledygook sounds almost … British.

  “I’m male! Doesn’t that matter?”

  “DUNKA-PUNKA!”

  Tribesmen push me closer to lava. I’m sweating.

  Cockney? “Dunk a punker?”

  They push me over.

  BRAIN TUMOR

  My brain had become impregnated with too many fruitful ideas. Time grew them tumorous, nestled together like a bunch of green bananas lining the inside of my skull. When the time was ripe to birth, I pushed and my brains squirted out of my eyes and ears. But somehow, nothing came out of my mouth.

  AMUSEMENT PA
RK RIDE #10: THE TILT-A-WHIRL

  “Listen, son. The whole Earth is a Tilt-a-Whirl, swinging all drunk around a wobbly axis while simultaneously looping in orbit around a fireball and the whole universe is nothing but an amusement park run by an insane carny called ‘God’ … so I do this because I love you,” he shouted as he pushed me out.

  PACK OF WOLVES

  The thing about being murdered by a pack of wolves is realizing that the first wolf’s jugular bite really was all it took. After that, it’s not “murder” anymore as much as it’s embarrassing. Why struggle now? Worse than murder is the massacre of your dignity; you’re nothing more than sloppy seconds and lucky leftovers.

  CORKSCREW

  I wink at my gorgeous lover and show off my corkscrew skills by twisting the bottle, not the screw. She squirms in her seat like she’s the bottle and I’m the screw. I blush, slipping, and the bottle’s neck cracks off as I twist, screwing into my wrist. Blood decants.

  She drinks it later, anyway.

  LAUGHTER

  I love laughing, but I don’t want to die laughing, my chortles echoing in the lonely execution chamber as I cackle at my joke about the guard’s expert “baton handling” right when the warden turns the switch and my diaphragm twitches, still laughing the air in and out of my wheezing, boiling brown lung tissue.

  SWEAT

  I am trapped in a giant tank full of sweat. The gathered perspiration of who knows how many people. I float with just a thin sliver of air between the surface and the lid. I wonder: Where’d all this sweat come from? Then I realize, treading heavily: my own sweat will soon top it off.

  AMUSEMENT PARK RIDE #11: BOUNCY HOUSEY

  I climb into the Inflatable House of Usher just as some kid cuts our anchor. Wind carries us swiftly over a cliff. We tumble—a knife spinning among us—like bones in a dice cup. The house hisses. Children scream. Lacquered in their blood I slicker around, laughing, living it up all the way down.

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  #56: Michael Arnzen died trying to write something pithy in just 55 words about the motivation behind “55 Ways I’d Prefer not to Die”—something about beating the reaper at his own game by imagining alternative endings to his own demise—and how this was what all horror fiction is always about—but instead created the most autobiographical thing he’d ever written: his obituary. Unfortunately, it was the extra 20 words that killed him.

  AMERICAN GODS, AMERICAN MONSTERS

  JOSÉ CRUZ

  From Hybrid Moments: A Literary Tribute to the Misfits

  Editors: MP Johnson and Sam Richard

  Publisher: Weirdpunk Books

  ______

  “My consuming lust was to experience their bodies. I viewed them as objects, as strangers. It is hard for me to believe a human being could have done what I’ve done.” —Jeffrey Dahmer

  “To a new world of gods and monsters!” —Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

  The Editor is driving a battered Impala down a haunted stretch of Florida backroad on a late afternoon in October. The scrapbook rides shotgun.

  A raw-gold sun blisters the windshield and gives illumination to the refuse of a roadbound life: fast food wrappers balled into knots; sweat-sogged cigarette packs, most half-full; amber-bottled stimulants illegally obtained; a scuffed thermos containing traces of brown water from a restroom tap, gas station coffee, lighter fluid masquerading as whiskey. The fumes from the tailpipe have taken on an ominous shade, and the engine hacks noisily in the hot, heavy air.

  The Editor isn’t in any better shape. He hasn’t been for some time. The scarlet rings under his eyes were ironed into the flesh years before from too many sleepless nights spent cobbling together a shit-can magazine at the cluttered kitchen table of his Atlanta duplex. The sallow paunch that bulges against his nicotine-starched shirt has been nurtured through a lifetime of microwaveable dinners eaten alone. There is more hair in his beard than his scalp; both are healthily peppered with gray.

  The Editor is a sad man in a dying car pulling through the steaming Florida countryland on a late afternoon in October, thinking that for perhaps the first time in his long, unfulfilling life, he has finally come to the gates of transcendence. The key to the gates rides shotgun.

  The Editor is chasing a ghost.

  Her name is Marilyn. Marilyn. Prescott. Ford. Beauty queen. Wife. Mother.

  Murderess.

  Even in this age of information, biographical data is scarce, with one paperback from the Cottonmouth Crime line—Little Miss Sunshine, Sid Haberchak, “The Unsolved Mystery of Florida’s Beautiful Butcher-Witch”—purporting to tell the whole story: late-night rehearsals at the demand of a cruel stage mother, taking lumps from Orange County johns, midnight visits to unlisted clinics. The Editor thinks that ninety-five percent of the book is precisely bullshit, an attempt to rationalize the boogeyman, give it a reason for what it did. But Marilyn’s motives, like so much else about her, still remain unknown, the source of breathless speculation.

  She was crowned St. Cloud’s “Miss Citrus of 1956” at the age of twenty-four. Hazy photographs of the event contain an undeniable kitsch factor—chorus girls in rotund orange costumes, an emcee in Brylcreem and bow tie—but Marilyn had been a vision amidst the trailer park Madonnas that surrounded her: marble skin and healthy curves, hair a sensuous wave, luminescent eyes that could’ve given Barbara Steele a run for her money, her perfect teeth like fangs, devouring time and space for those who found themselves caught in the magnetic pull of her smile.

  There was one surviving color photo from the pageant; the Editor had had to pay triple figures for it on the Forum. Its greatest revelation was that Ford’s pageant dress had actually been cherry-red. On the body of an inferior specimen, the shade would have looked incredibly gauche, slutty, but on Marilyn the fabric was subsumed into her anatomy, a gorgeous outpouring of the all-American blood that flowed within her. The Editor had pasted this picture to the very first page of the scrapbook.

  Ford had an abbreviated film career following her pageant days, mostly nudie-cuties and splatter flicks made by H.G. Lewis and the verminous fly-by-night hacks who circulated through the independent scene. The sex pictures were fairly standard stuff for the day, but the later turn of events in her life gave Ford’s appearances in the horror films an irrepressible, perverse chill. There was an uncanny dissonance in watching a known killer play the role of victim, massaging pointed breasts with electric-red paint as the shadow of a leering psycho swallowed up her beautiful eyes. Unlike with other “actresses,” seeing Marilyn naked did nothing to take away from her ethereal sensuality. If anything, her nude form only moved her deeper into the realm of enigma.

  When she married a car salesman with political aspirations in 1960, the pageants and the drive-in films ground to a stop. Ford assumed the role of housewife, a part, albeit humble, that she seemed to happily play. An archived feature from the St. Cloud Herald covering her husband’s gambit for mayoral election included a few photos of the family at home. Here, the salesman grinning from a plastic-wrapped floral couch, Marilyn tucked under his arm. There, the couple’s five-year-old daughter beaming in mid-leap as she demonstrated her expert jump-roping skills, parents looking on in approval.

  Marilyn had traded in the silk gown and sash of her glory day for a sundress and apron, and though motherhood had marked her face with a few extra wrinkles and blemishes, her beauty was just as tactile as it had been before. But the Editor felt there was something different about her in these later shots, a calcification of the spirit made manifest in her appearance. Looking at these photos, the Editor thought that he could have reached out and removed Marilyn’s face as cleanly as if it were a mask.

  And of course, that’s exactly what it was.

  Dan and Patty Kessler were enjoying spiked lemonade in the dim of their Florida room when they heard the sound of weeping drifting from their neighbors’ backyard. Concern bubbling with tipsy adventure, the couple decided to investig
ate. This was August 13th 1965, the night it all happened.

  It was on entering the sprawling, manicured yard that they found Marilyn and the remains of her family. Her husband lay twisted in a checkered sheet, cold and bleeding out from a dozen crying wounds delivered by an ax that had fallen nearby. His face had been mutilated, the lips slit upward into a Glasgow smile. Charred meat sizzled quietly on the smoldering grill. Somewhere in the darkened house, the Righteous Brothers were wailing into the shadows.

  Marilyn sat gripping a straight razor, eyes running with black tears, hands gleaming in the orange dusk. She had performed the same operation on herself, and she would periodically choke on the tears that leaked through the open cuts in her face. She managed to utter only a single lament between sobs: “It should’ve been harder … It should’ve been harder.”

  Dan rushed into the house to call an ambulance while Patty watched Marilyn from a respectable distance. She followed Marilyn when she rose suddenly and trudged to the tall fence that bordered the woods, watching with barely-contained repulsion as her traumatized neighbor began rocking herself slowly underneath the shade of a pepper tree.