The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

viscera cooling in the afternoon fog.

She moved cautiously and yet was still caught off guard when she came upon the creature sitting at the lip of a great fissure in the earth, neatly tearing apart the body of a fat human male. It was larger than a man, maybe eight feet tall if it stood erect, with a body thickened by a studded, convoluted armor except for long, thin, and tortuously knotted legs. Its arms were as long and hideously muscled as its legs, but the biceps were lined with thorny growths and the triceps covered by the heavy carapace that extended sharply off its shoulders. But it was the creature’s head that frightened her most, especially in the moment it turned to look at her. Long and sleek along the cheeks but sharply ridged and crowned along the top, it seemed to have no definite eyes or ears or nose—just a mouth like a long, soft-fleshed proboscis. Without knowing where its eyes might be, Kate knew exactly the moment it looked into her eyes while its lips peeled back to show a ring of sharp teeth. She saw those teeth actually bend into hooks, and in the next instant saw a long tongue dance out between them in a hypnotic pattern.

It dropped the body pieces to the ground and roared. The armor on its shoulders rose and fanned outward like the plumage of an iron peacock as it crouched.

Kate raised the shotgun and fired at the beast that stood no more than fifteen feet from her. As she turned to run, she caught sight of the armored wing blades exploding into a hundred black jagged pieces. Then she ran as fast as she could, her feet directing her to lower ground for speed’s sake alone. She could hear and smell the creature closing the distance on her.

She leaped over the trunk of a fallen tree, whirled and fired point blank at the beast just as it leaped. The recoil knocked her backward as the beast clutched its stomach, howling in pain as it dropped to its knees.

Dazed and winded, Kate wobbled to her feet and watched the creature thrash upon the ground. It was not weakening; it was not dying. Its thrashing was growing more violent, more energized, and she realized it was about to rise again. Fearing her dread would paralyze her, she yanked the shotgun away from the grasping wormgrasses and resumed her downhill flight.

It wasn’t long before she once again felt its presence behind her. She could see something down at the bottom of the slope—a roof of some kind—and next to it, a gutted automobile. She tried to spring toward it, her stride so exaggerated and unsteady on the steep incline that she was afraid she was about to run off the edge of a cliff.

Instead, she tripped over a crusty growth and went rolling through the grass. The shotgun bounced on downhill; she glimpsed it disappearing in the fog as she skidded to a stop. Her skin began to itch and burn. Slapping and scratching at her skin, Kate was completely off-guard when the creature slammed into her, wrapping her in its sharp, deadly caress.

Four years earlier, Kate had been stabbed in the arm by a woman who could no longer stand having this angelhair-conjuring witch in her home. Two and a half years earlier, she’d been gang raped by a group of Stragglers, one of whom had held a .38 to her cheek as he giggled his way through the act. She knew more about the threat of close-range death—intimate death—than she could even bear to think about. And yet nothing could compare to being wrapped in the thorned arms of this monster, her face only inches from the prehensile teeth that were hooking toward her.

Her ten-inch blade was in her hand on instinct; she didn’t know if the soft white bulge tucked within the armored folds of that face was an eye or an ear or what, only that it was close and vulnerable. The blade sank into the bulge just as the creature’s tongue-tip sliced open her cheek. It released her and grabbed the ruptured orifice with one hand, thrashing out blindly with the other in a backhanded blow across Kate’s face that threw her down the slope. It seemed to take forever to touch ground, but when she did she tumbled out of control over rocks and brittle mounds rising out of the earth.

Two thoughts screamed for attention as she finally rolled to a stop. One, the fiery pain she felt was not something within her but something swarming upon her. Two, there was someone standing above her, a thin and bloodied male. She blacked out while still trying to figure out whether this strange looking person—now kneeling toward her—was a child or an old man.

Paul could see fleeting glimpses of the monster on the high ground above the court as it took a hesitant step downward, then retreated. He had to strain to make out the black shape against the churning fogbank, afraid he might lose sight of it as it crept down the slope to attack. Finally, he caught a brief, final glimpse of the creature slinking back to the high ground.

It’s afraid of the Mites, just the way Dad used to tell me.

Paul pulled the woman out of the rubble, struggling to heft her over his shoulder. She was just a little shorter than he was and probably a lot lighter, but she was out cold and almost impossible to lift. He finally managed to get her back to the trailer and stretched her out on the concrete at the base of the front steps. His father sat out on the picnic bench, his eyes bulging, empty whites, nodding his head and mumbling replies to the very real voices in his head while Paul examined the woman’s face, her arms, legs, ribs. Nothing seemed to be broken, but she was cut badly on her face and hands.

Worse, though, were the Mites. He could see their glittering shells moving in and out of her long, thick hair, moving along her cuts and dancing within the coagulating blood. He ran into the trailer and came out with scissors and wet rags, hastily cleaning the wounds and wiping away as many of the Mites as he could, then began hacking at her hair. Within minutes he had it chopped down to two or three inches, at which point he rested her head in his lap and began picking at individual Mites, crushing them between thumb and forefinger, slapping at those that escaped onto his pants, moving quickly and with the hopeless determination he’d once used with his father—before the man had succumbed to the sweet, perpetual dreamworld which the Mites offered and began responding to Paul with violent flailings and screams. Then it had no longer been his father talking, but the Mites inside of him.

Paul looked at the woman’s face as he groomed her. He wondered how old she was. Surely not as old as father. Thirty? Twenty-five? There was a delicate beauty about her features that no scar or stress line could hide. He had been a little boy the last time he’d seen a real, uninfested woman—probably no more than twelve years old.

He saw a large Mite disappear down the front of her shirt and ripped away the buttons in a panic, trying to grab it before it escaped. Suddenly she was awake, letting out a scream that escalated into a roar and grabbing his wrists. He tried to stand but her grip was unbreakable and he found himself fighting to free his wrists and retain his balance as she stood and tried to throw him back to the ground. He twisted his body abruptly, managed to free one arm and break her grip on the other with a downward sweep onto her forearm. She howled with pain, then punched him in the face. He landed tailbone first on the concrete and then squinted up at her, trying to make her out through the thousands of flashing lights that danced before his eyes. When he focused on that face again—that pretty, delicate face—it wore a wide-eyed, teeth-clenching grimace of rage. Her hand fumbled at an empty knife sheath.

“I was only trying to get the Mites off you, lady. They’re all over you.” He propped himself up on one elbow and pointed toward the stream. “You better go wash yourself off—”

He didn’t have to finish. Her attention turned abruptly to the hundreds of tiny creatures crawling over her. She let out a resounding “Shit,” then headed off toward the stream. She turned back to him for just a moment as he was standing up. “You lay a hand on me again, mister, and I’ll fucking KILL you!”

He watched her retreat and wiped away the blood that was leaking from his nose and into his mouth.

His father moaned and looked at Paul with eyes that for just a moment seemed just a little bit aware and alive before his weighted head drooped forward and the eyes went dead-white once again. When Paul stepped forward to push his father’s body into a more comfortable position, he noticed several long, white strands of hair lying across his arm and draped over his head. He gathered them together and held them to his face and breathed deep. They smelled sweet and pungent… like the woman bathing in the stream.

They lived in rusted hulls that were scratched and torn from some long-forgotten struggle, staring at the outside world through cracked and cobwebbed glass. Had Kate been of a more philosophical mind, she might have taken issue with the idea that they were still human at all. As it was, she could only look upon them with hopeless, cautionary fear, knowing that the only way to avoid their fate was to climb out of this crumbling, parking-lot wasteland and face the thing that had forced her here in the first place.