The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (43 page)

Being fast, she’d got away from him, burrowing under the velvet covers of the cage. Being so small, she slid between the bars.

The women, even the royal ones, let out a scream. The men were on their feet with swords and pistols drawn. They’d come to see The Theologist perform a miracle, not the slaughter of a child. Hastings barged past the stagehands who tried to pull him back. He snatched a heavy swathe of velvet and pulled the curtain to the floor.

Victor Mallory had been perched upon the stool as they secured the cage. The Raja himself had checked the locks. Now, the Theologist wasn’t there. It was his famous bear. The animal didn’t rear up and bare his teeth as it normally did to impress the crowds. It was perched upon the stool, a fox cub curled up on its knee. Bear and fox gazed at each other in awe.

Afterwards, Lily rolled away from Robert. She surprised herself. There was no surge of shame, just relief. It had been urgent. Essential, even. She’d been unburdened. The reality of dreaming set her free. To kill, to feast, to copulate, to bathe in moonlight if she choose.

“Your dreams are your own,” he stroked her back, “Victor can’t give them to you.”

“Nor can you,” she turned to face him. “This doesn’t mean I’m yours. Or any man’s. I am my own.”

“Of course you are.” Then more softly, “None of us here at Grissleymire hold with ownership.”

It was the gentlest of reproaches.

He pulled their clothes over them. It was colder in their human skins. Lily could smell smoke. Music carried on the breeze. The strains of a jig played on a distant fiddle.

“Gypsies. Is it them that keep hunters off the land?”

“Warn them off. No more. They wouldn’t break the law for us.”

“They don’t work for Victor?”

Robert considered this.

“No, but Grissleymire’s a haven for them too. They’ll help if we need to leave here in a hurry.”

She sat up, shawl clutched to her breasts. “Leave?”

“Our sort doesn’t die peacefully in our beds. Someone will come for us eventually. Someone will always want our skins.”

The music was stopped by the tolling of the bell. A sound not belonging to the dead of night. A signal to take flight.

Grissleymire had once had its own chapel, but now all that remained was the tower and the bell. Someone had raised the alarm. The Romany camped around the grounds answered the call, having empathy for the displaced. Sympathy for the damned. They came with carriages and carts. Blinkers and nosebags filled with lavender quieted the horses.

Lily and Robert came upon an evacuation. Parents had shaken children from their beds. Those that roamed at night returned on all fours. Chests and carpetbags spilled clothes and pots and pans. The man with the ledger was at the door, ordering the chaos, doling out diamonds and gold. Everyone would have a share.

“What happened?” Robert asked.

“In there.” He didn’t pause in counting coins.

There’d been carnage. Lacey’s mastiffs lay where they’d been struck down. They’d been picked up and shaken by a snarling snout. Their throats ripped out.

“Arthur! Arthur!” Robert called. He’d seized Lily’s hand so as not to lose her in the crowd.

Arthur was a sad-faced man with amber eyes and a cloud of golden hair. He clapped Robert on the arm.

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Two men came with dogs. They wanted the girl.”

“You did that?” Robert meant the hounds spread across the hall.

“Yes,” Arthur looked ashamed.

“You’d better get going.”

“Will I see you again, my friend?”

“Of course.”

Lily turned away, unable to bear the final goodbyes in their eyes.

Vivien came jostling down the stairs, a cub under each arm. She spat at Lily and gnashed her teeth, angry to have to take her babies on the road so young.

“I believe this is yours.”

Vivien unknotted her apron and the head within rolled across the floor. She could spot ruffians like Pike at a mile. He’d received a savaging for her lifetime of ill use. Woe the man who threatened her brood. Lily noted that in Pike’s last moments, he’d had the grace to be surprised.

“Victor’s in the library with the other one. He says he’s staying here.” Then to Lily, “This is your fault.”

Victor and Lacey were alone. Lacey lay upon the floor. Lily could tell him from his clothes. His face lay separated, torn off by a single swipe from Victor’s paw. Lily stepped over him.

Blood-stained Victor didn’t get up.

“Victor. It’s me. Lily.” She knelt beside him.

“We were gods once.” He was looking at statues in the niches, the papyrus of the jackal headed man.

“Victor, we must leave,” Robert pleaded. “More men will come.”

Victor put a hand on Lily’s head. The weight of it was immense. A single strike would send her reeling across the room. Instead, there was only a gentle pat.

“They always come, eventually.”

“It’s my fault,” Lily confessed, “they followed me.”

She waited for the killing blow.

“I dare say I’ve done much worse in my time. You really don’t remember that day at the palace?”

“Yes, I do now. Papa was so angry. He said I was showing off.”

“He was frightened for you.”

“He made me promise never to do it again. I thought I hadn’t. Then, when he died, the dreams started. What I thought were dreams.”

“It’s time for you to go.”

“Not without you,” Robert said. “Come with me. I’ll take care of you.”

Victor tutted.

“You’ve gone soft. You shouldn’t make such offers. You’ve forgotten how to survive. She knows,” he pointed at Lily, “you should learn from her.”

Nature had deemed that Victor had outlived his usefulness but he’d not outlived Robert’s love. The fierceness of his feeling for another was what moved Lily the most. Robert clung to Victor, who pried him off. Lily dragged him from the room. He raised his head and howled. It took all her strength to calm his down.

“Come away, he’s tired. He needs to sleep, my love.”

Late morning, early in winter. The meet gathered, strutted in their scarlet. Drank Madeira from crystal glasses. The horses stamped and pranced, steam streamed from their nostrils. The hounds were brought. A seething mass.

They did not smell the vixen or her mate. They’d rolled in juniper bushes to mask their scent. They watched the hunt move off from their vantage point upon the outhouse roof. No one was left to see them slide off and run along the wall. Streaks of brown and white and red, then gone.

In which we learn why having a zombie play baseball is not a good idea . . . even if you put him in left field.

Rocket Man
Stephen Graham Jones

The dead aren’t exactly known for their baseball skills, but still, if you’re a player short some afternoon, just need a body to prop up out in left field—it all comes down to how bad you want to play, really. Or, in our case—where you can understand that by “our” I mean “my,” in that I promised off four of my dad’s cigarettes, one of my big brother’s magazines, and one sleepover lie—how bad you want to impress Amber Watson, on the walk back from the community pool, her lifeguard eyes already focused on everything at once.

Last week, I’d actually smacked the ball so hard that Rory at shortstop called time, to show how the cover’d rolled half back, the red stitching popped.

“You scalped it,” he said, kind of curling his lip in awe.

I should mention I’m Indian, except everybody’s always doing that for me.

The plan that day we pulled a zombie in (it had used to be Michael T from over on Oak Circle, but you’re not supposed to call zombies by their people names), my plan was to hit that same ball—I’d been saving it—even harder, so that there’d just be a cork center twirling up over our diamond, trailing leather and thread. Amber Watson would track back from that cracking sound to me, still holding my follow-through like I was posing for a trophy. And then of course I’d look through the chain link, kind of nod to her that this was me, yeah, this was who I really am, she’s just never seen it, and she’d smile and look away, and things in the halls at school would be different between us then. More awkward. She might even start timing her walks to coincide with some guess at my spot in the batting order.

Anyway, it wasn’t like there was anything else I could ever possibly do that might have a chance of impressing her.

But first, of course, we needed that body to prop up out in left field. Which, I know you’re thinking “right,
right
field,” these are sixth graders, they never wait, they always step out, slap the ball early, and, I mean, maybe the kids from Chesterton or Memphis City do, I don’t know. But around here, we’ve been taught to wait, to time it out, to let that ball kind of hover in the pocket before we launch it into orbit. Kids from Chesterton? None of them are ever going pro. Not like us.

It’s why we fail the spelling test each Friday, why we blow the math quiz if we’re not sitting by somebody smart. You don’t need to know how to spell “homerun” to hit one. You don’t have to add up runners in your head, so long as you knock them all in. Easy as that.

As for Michael T, none of us had had much to do with him since he got bit, started playing for the other team. There were the lunges from behind the fence on the way to school, there was that shape kind of scuffling around when you took the trash out some nights, but that could have been any zombie. It didn’t have to be Michael T. And, pulling him in that day to just stand there, let the flies buzz in and out of his mouth—it’s not like that’s not what he did
before
he was dead. You only picked Michael T if he was the only one to pick, I’m saying. You wouldn’t think that either, him being a year older than us and all, but he’d always just been our size, too. Most kids like that, a grade up but not taller, they’d at least be fast, or be able to fling the ball home all the way from the center fence. Not Michael T. Michael T—the best way to explain him, I guess, it’s that his big brother used to pin him down to the ground at recess, drop a line of spit down almost to his face, the rest of us looking but not looking. Glad just not to be him.

That day, though, with Amber Watson approaching on my radar, barefoot the way she usually was, her shoes hooked over her shoulder like a rich lady’s purse, that day, it was either Michael T or nobody. Or, at first it
was
nobody, but then, just joking around, Theodore said he’d seen Michael T shuffling around down by the rocket park anyway.

“Michael
T
?” I asked.

“He still can’t catch,” Theodore said.

“That was all the way before lunch, though, yeah?” Rory said, socking the ball into his glove for punctuation.

It was nearly three, now.

“Can you track him?” Les said, falling in as we rounded the backstop.

“Your nose not work?” I asked him back.

Just another perfect summer afternoon.

We kicked a lopsided rock nearly all the way to where Michael T was supposed to have been, and then we turned to Theodore. He shrugged, was ready to fight any of us, even tried some of the words he’d learned from spying on his uncles in the garage. He wasn’t lying, though. Splatted all over the bench were the crab apples him and Jefferson Banks had been zinging Michael T with.

“Jefferson,” I said, “what about him?”

“Said he had to go home,” Theodore shrugged, half-embarrassed for Jefferson. “His mom.”

Figured. The one time I can impress Amber Watson and Jefferson’s cleaning out all the ashtrays in the house then reading romance novels to his mom while she tans in the backyard.

“Who then?” Les asked, shading his eyes from the sun, squinting across all the glinty metal of the old playground.

None of us came to this one anymore. It was for kids.

“He’s got to be around,” Theodore said. “My dad said they like beef jerky.”

I seconded this, had heard it as well.

You could lure a zombie anywhere if you had a twist of dried meat on a long string. It was supposed to be getting bad enough with the high schoolers that the stores in town had put a limit on beef jerky, two per customer.

I kicked at another rock that was there by the bench. It wasn’t our lopsided one, was probably one Jefferson and Theodore had tried on Michael T. There was still a little bit of blood on it. All the ants were loving the crab apple leftovers, but, for them, there was a force field around where that rock had been. Until the next rain, anyway.

“She’s never going to see me,” I said, just out loud.

“Who?” Theodore asked, studying the park like Amber Watson could possibly be walking through it.

I shook my head no, never mind, and, turning away, half-planning to set a mirror up in right field, let Gerald just stand kind of by it, so it would seem like we had a full team, I caught a flash of cloth all the way in the top of the rocket.

“It’s not over yet,” I said, pointing up there with my chin.

Somebody was up there, right at the top where the astronauts would sit if it were a real rocket. The capsule part. And they were moving.

“Jefferson?” Theodore asked, looking to us for support.

Like monkeys, Les and Rory crawled up the outside of the rocket, high enough that their moms had to be having heart attacks in their kitchens.

When they got there, Rory had to turn to the side to throw up. It took that loogey of puke forever to make it to the ground. We laughed because it was throw-up, then tracked back up to the top of the rocket.

“It’s Michael T!” Les called down, waving his hand like there was anywhere else in the whole world we might be looking.

“What’s he doing?” I asked, not really loud enough, my eyes kind of pre-squinted, because this might be going to mess our game up.

“It’s Jefferson,” Theodore filled in, standing right beside me, and he was right.

Instead of going home like his mom wanted, Jefferson had spiraled up into the top of the rocket, probably to check if his name was still there, and never guessed Michael T might still be lurking around. Even a first grader can outrun or outsmart a zombie, but, in a tight place like that, and especially if you’re in a panic, are freaking out, then it’s a different kind of game altogether.