The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

frozen and thickened into poses of erect, skyward-staring submission.

When the fat man finally approached Paul, the boy was scratching his bald, slashed and scabby head and looking at the dead Mites in his bloody hand.

“You! Boy! What the hell kind of a place is this, anyway? What’s happened down here?”

The Straggler smelled awful, looked awful, and had a hateful sneer on his face. The boy spat into the fog and walked away carelessly, calling over his shoulder, “What’s the matter? You haven’t seen Mites before?”

“Mites? Is that what they are? What are they doing to all these people?” Now the fat man sounded truly frightened. His palms slid over his face and body, searching out the bugs before they began to dig at him.

And so Paul tried to explain the Mites to him, though everything Paul knew was obvious just from looking at his father for a few minutes: the Mites not only built their mounds up from the ground, but were able to dig into the scalps of higher organisms—dig deep—and build their clustered towers out of the tops of their hosts’ heads. Some of these crowns were well over a foot high with bases that swelled in gruesome brick patterns over the hosts’ brow ridges. The Mites were everywhere.

“And that’s why your scalp is so fucked up?”

Paul shrugged.

“Why don’t you leave? I mean, things are bad up there, but you could get away from these things. You’ll starve to death down here. That stream you’re drinking from is so full of toxins that nothing can live in it. Look,” he said, his eyes getting funny and his cheeks started to rumble, “you can leave with me. I got a truck up there.” He pointed to the highlands beyond the trailer court. “You can work for me. You’ll eat well, see lots of things, grow your hair back. What do you say?”

Paul shrugged again and shook his head. No, he wasn’t going anywhere with the Straggler, and he wouldn’t feel safe venturing out of the trailer court with anyone. When he told the Straggler why, the fat man laughed.

“There’s no monsters in those hills, kid. No, you know, real monsters. And if there were, what would keep them from coming down here for you? Who’s gonna protect you here?”

The boy slapped himself in the face and held out his palm so the Straggler could see the Mite squashed across his fingers. “They do. The monsters are afraid of them.”

“Ah, Jesus Christ, you little ass! I’m leaving and if you want to come along, you’d damn well better tell me now!”

He got no answer, and turned with another dismissive wave and walked away. Paul followed, asking him to bring back some canned goods. But the Straggler wasn’t giving away anything and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make the walk down from the road again. Paul followed him to the court’s entrance, then watched him stumble through the grasses along the jagged shards of concrete that had once been the road leading into the trailer court oh-so-many impossible years ago.

Within moments, the fat man was swallowed in the rolling fog. Paul stood there for a few minutes, listening for the sound of a scream, the starting of an engine, but heard nothing. He decided to see if he could find himself and his father something to eat.

The Beast crawled from a narrow opening in the earth, away from the shrieks and the wet crowded darkness. He stood in the fog and listened.

Not far away, something big and clumsy trudged across the mud and jagged concrete slopes. It did not sound like one of the sick ones who lived in the valley. He had caught one of those not long ago, when hunger had driven him nearly mad and rendered him groggy and weak. He had torn it apart searching for meat, but found only shriveled organs, swollen joints, and a heavy, rocklike growth atop its head which grew deep into the skull, piercing and embracing the jellylike brain. Mites had exploded out of that head so quickly that he wasn’t sure whether they had also infiltrated the dry, narrow cavities within the body itself. It didn’t matter; there was very little edible meat on the body and the Mites were so voracious that they attacked him immediately, driving him away before he had a chance to take more than a few tentative, dissatisfied bites.

But this one was surrounded by a pungent, alluring odor as it gasped at the thick air and stumbled over the earth. He could feel the vibrations of every step.

Fantasies of ruptured, flowing flesh appeared in the darkness of his mind like quick, blinding flashes of light as he crouched behind a rotted stump, resting his arm along the fallen length of tree that still connected it by thin, tenacious strands. He watched as the figure appeared from out of the fog; a man, not too old, and very fat. The man did not see him through the fog, even as he looked around in a kind of desperate, cautious confusion. He was searching for something, and was too distracted to notice. The man stumbled off in another direction, up and toward the road.

He followed at a safe distance, measuring the strength and edibility of the man, deciding whether it would be better to give chase or spring upon him from a hiding place somewhere farther down the path. But as the human gasped and the smell of his sweat grew stronger, the Beast grew hungrier, more agitated, then found his legs pumping harder as he zeroed in with silent fury, in a race against time and starvation.

The fat man turned and gaped, face frozen in stupid terror as his belly was slit open with a swift downward slash of claw. The scream was transformed into a gurgle almost before it left the Straggler’s mouth.

He slid his hand through the tear and felt his fingers swim through the tangle of intestines, rupturing the stomach and left lung before gently fondling the beating heart as he lowered the fat man’s body into the shivering wormgrasses. He knelt close as the heartbeat quickened and grew erratic under his probing fingers. He looked into bulging brown eyes and let his tongue unroll; the sharp but oil-moistened tip of his tongue ran graceful lines around the eyes, savoring the stupid fear of the dying man, smelling the meat as it marinated in its own panic, before driving his tongue brainward through the eye as his hand crushed the heart within the body cavity.

Wherever Kate traveled, the angelhair followed. It fell through the fog, it fell from the trees in the dead and dying forests, it fell between the hollowed out buildings in the infested city wastelands that sprawled across the landscape like impenetrable but unavoidable barriers. Once she found herself in a clear, blue-skied flatland of rock, sand, and small, whimpering cactus. Even there the angelhair fell from the sky, marking the path she followed, draping across her shoulders and her thick black hair, sometimes setting a path she then felt compelled to follow. If she stood in someone’s doorway begging for a place to hide from the night-cold, there was no way to conceal the thin strands that danced down upon her, and when her host awoke the next morning to find the house smothered in angelhair, Kate was sent on her way. If she slept too long in the open, she would awaken beneath a deep pile of the stuff, hidden from madmen and predators but unable to breathe and barely able to move. She traveled to keep it from accumulating too thickly in one spot, weaving a restless zigzag across the country.

She was moving into lowland country now. There were things that spread like grasses here, but when she sat or tried to catnap, they seemed not to be grasses at all but vast, uniform colonies of gently flagellating worms.

Kate followed the path of a narrow, shallow stream that cut through the shrouded landscape. Within it swam small fish, so weakened that it was easy to scoop them from the water for food. But most of them were bent and crippled by parasites that clung to their sides and slowly sucked their life away. These parasites had thorny carapaces and hooks that dug deep into the flesh. The parasites themselves were inedible and impossible to remove without tearing the fish to pieces. She had run out of food and would have used her gun to hunt if the few animals she saw were large enough to withstand a shotgun blast and still remain relatively intact; instead, she scooped at schools of dying fish and hunted for those few—literally about one out of ten—that had not already become a host.

When she first heard the sounds she stopped and tried to form a picture of a creature which would make such sounds. Whatever it was, it was big, and whether it was chewing on the carcass of another animal or just munching away at the wormgrasses, Kate was sure it was dangerous. She moved quietly, her sharp eyes scanning the misty countryside. Kate had seen any number of incredible things during her years of wandering, and the more time went on and the more populations everywhere thinned out, the more extreme and unpredictable the life forms became. She followed the chewing and tearing sounds, slowing with every step as they became louder and more focused and she began to imagine in those sounds and scents the presence of flesh, bone,